Cheating at School Is Easier Than Ever–and It’s Rampant

When I was a student in 2001, I was remote learning via a specialized satellite television system. I also had internet access and was unsupervised, so "cheating" was very easy, and I did so often. Yet I still managed to learn, very well. I put "cheating" in quotes because I think we need to redefine what cheating means to exclude looking up answers. And we need to rethink how we verify and measure learning. We should be encouraging students to look up answers, and teaching them how to do that. Instead of measuring what people know, we should measure what they can DO with what they know. Project-based evaluation and dynamic performances should replace problem worksheets and exam forms.

Switching to exams in person and more presentation-based exams is how you get around this. You can pay someone to write a paper, but its hard to then show mastery of that topic in a discussion with your professor.

That would require professors to show interest in teaching, so I doubt universities would go for it. It doesn't scale and they're not interested in adequate staffing.

Perhaps we shouod be rethinking the entire premise of school assessment.

The goal is ostensibly to learn. We only assess so students can prove they learned to third parties, and perhaps secondarily for inatructors to assess how effective they are.

The more cynical view is that education is the exams, and we only care about obtainmentnof the credentials.

I remember reading a number of years ago about a method of detecting the leaker of documents that are supposed to be kept confidential. [1] This is basically what the statistics professor used to catch the cheaters in his class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap

P.S. Yes I know that this technique played an important role in "Patriot Games" by Tom Clancy.

This article did some decent research about what cheating is happening, though it doesn't really get into why. It certainly is getting rampant.

I suspect (this is a hunch) that cheating really takes off in professions where schools or early career hiring managers have more talent than they can bring on board. Med schools, for example, would fall under this category. This often surprises engineers, but elite medical schools in the US often have admissions rates below 4% and attrition rates well below 1% (something that a is essentially unheard of in graduate STEM programs, which even at the elite level have attrition rates of 25%-50% depending on MS vs PhD and program/field). In other words, for med school, getting in is the hardest part. They work the students hard, but pretty much everyone graduates, and job prospects are very, very good for almost all graduates (again, this is at the elite level).

Because they are so selective, having an MCAT at the 99%ile rather than the 97.5%ile does make a difference. Having a GPA of 3.9 instead of 3.65 does make a difference. My guess is that you could replace the entire class 10 times over without a dramatic drop in quality of graduates or physicians. It is, in this sense, excessively selective (I've heard it described, interestingly, as ironically selective).

Now, add in the fact that some students are cheating - not to pass, and not to deny themselves an education (they are hardworking and absolutely do learn the material), but to bump their numbers up juuuust enough get get an edge.

This isn't to justify it. I still consider it scummy. But to some extent, this is the byproduct of cartel building in medicine (and other fields) that artificially restrict the supply of physicians or other types of workers, creating a situation where "too many" very talented people are competing for "too few" spots (to everyone's detriment other than the members of the cartel).

But the image of the cheater as a slacker who doesn't care about learning and cheats to get a bit of parchment, denying themselves the education they went to college to receive? Eh. I'm sure that happens, but a lot of cheaters are actually very high talent, extremely driven and motivated people who are cheating to get an edge, kind of like the difference between an elite cyclist who trains intensely and an elite cyclist who trains intensely and takes PEDs.

I have had reports from students attending engineering classes say that since all classes have been on-line; teachers and administration keep increasing methods, amounts, and tools for testing, yet are decreasing the methods, amounts and tools for teaching. They complain, rightfully, how are they supposed to learn, when all that happens is they are tested?

Idiocracy, the beginning.

If the cheating is as rampant as the article make it out to be then they'll be the ones struggling in just a short while down the road.