I tell people all the time that being a college professor is my dream job. However, no job is perfect. Probably the worst part of my job is dealing with cheating.
I'll never forget my first year as a young college instructor when I discovered one of my students had turned in a program identical to another student's. When I confronted her about it in my office, she adamantly claimed that she was the sole author of her program. After questioning her for what seemed like hours and confronting her with the hard facts I had at my disposal, she finally admitted that she had been lying and had copied the program from a fellow classmate. Once she left my office, I sat down and cried! (I'm not much of a crier.) I took her lies very personally.
When COVID hit in March 2020 and Harding went all online, the number of cheating incidences in my classes rose significantly. I spent an incredible amounts of time dredging up evidence, confronting students, and listening to one bald-faced lie after another. In one case, I had to listen to a lawnmower mom's plea to avoid reporting the incident. It was absolutely infuriating dealing with the cheating on top of COVID and the stress of teaching online for the first time.
Other CS instructors were also noticing the uptick of academic dishonestly, and the topic of cheating was widely discussed in the SIGCSE listserv (email list for CS instructors). What could we to do to reduce cheating in our classes? In one thread, several instructors recommended reading Cheating Lessons by James Lang. Lang is a professor of English who has studied cheating for years. His book is intended to distill some myths around cheating and share best practices for reducing academic dishonesty (while increasing learning).
I found Lang's book to be very helpful. In fact, I implemented several of his suggestions this last academic year. What follows are my biggest takeaways from Lang's book.
- There's no evidence that students are cheating more today than they were in previous decades. It just feels like they are more dishonest because of the cheating scandals that constantly make the news.
- Cheating is more likely to happen in a learning environment when:
- The emphasis is on performing well on an exam rather than mastering the material
- There are high stakes riding on the outcome
- Students have an extrinsic motivation for success, like a "good grade"
- Students experience low self-efficacy - they don't think they'll be successful
- Students believe their peers approve of cheating and are doing it themselves
- Lang shows a number of ways other great teachers foster intrinsic motivation and learning for mastery, like giving students more opportunities and choice when it comes to assignments. What I found most immediately doable was to increase the frequency of quizzes and exams. Research shows that the more frequently we are asked to draw material from memory, the more likely we are to recall that information over the long term (this is called the "testing effect").
- When giving an assessment, ensure students get proper practice developing the skills or applying the knowledge in the same way the assessment works. For example, if the assessment is a multiple-choice exam, students should take lower-stakes multiple-choice quizzes as practice.
- Students will stop studying when they think they know the material they are studying well. But many students have poor metacognition (awareness of his or her understanding of a topic). We can help students improve their metacognition by using formative assessments during teaching. For example, giving in-class clicker questions gives students a more accurate picture of whether they know the material or not.
- Using class time to lecture less and have students work on exercises gives students much-needed practice. It often reduces cheating by giving students with poor metacognition some self-confidence that they can actually do the homework.
- Honor codes that encourage students to turn in cheaters don't work. Do not leave the enforcement of academic honesty to students; faculty should be primarily responsible for enforcement.
- Students don't always know what academic honesty means. They need training to understand it.
- When responding to cheating, don't take it personally. Use this as a teachable moment. Avoid simply giving the offender a slap on the wrist... research shows that once you commit your first act of dishonesty, you are more likely to commit others.
