That Can’t Be True!
Darren Miller and Joanne Jacobs both pointed to this study, and because I’m in a fairly foul mood, I might as well, too: Survey of teens reveals entrenched habits of dishonesty — stealing, lying, and cheating rates climb to alarming rates.
Is anyone surprised? Seriously? Really? Let’s step back and look at this, then.
We live in a nation now where educrats actively collaborate with students to undermine education and further academic dishonesty. Poor little Johnny! He has such an awful home life, and he’s an official oppressed minority! Of course, I gave him an A, even if he did nothing but piss on the floor the few times he did come to class! It will boost his self-esteem!
Think I’m full of it? Then read this, from the same report:
Despite these high levels of dishonesty, the respondents have a high self-image when it comes to ethics. A whopping 93 percent said they were satisfied with their personal ethics and character and 77 percent said that when it comes to doing what is right, I am better than most people I know.
The only larger and fouler pile of horse manure than “diversity” is “self-esteem.” This is what the “boost their little self-esteems!” movement has gotten us — but they feel good about being lying, cheating little scumbags, and that’s great!
And the prime force behind this “self-esteem” idiocy has been the educational establishment. Nobody else even comes close. Put idiots with idiot education degrees in charge of education, and this is what we get.
What really honks me off, however, is when educrats take a break from forbidding teachers from giving zeroes for zero work or suspending students for having their asthma inhalers at school so they can wring their hands about academic dishonesty. Oh no, we caught a cheater! Not at our school!
Here’s a little common sense. If you want to stop, or at least minimize a behavior, punish it. If you want to encourage it, don’t.
So if you really want to stop cheating, read on. If you want to whine about disadvantaged this and poverty that and otherwise waste oxygen, do it somewhere else.
Here’s how to minimize cheating, from June of 2007.
I’m a bit mystified by all the complaints about rampant cheating on exams. You can’t ever entirely stop cheating, but you can certainly cut it to a minimum, and it’s not hard to do, either. But you have to take cheating seriously, or your students won’t.
Remember one thing: If you don’t punish cheating, more students will cheat. So if you only slap cheaters lightly on the hand, you don’t have any business complaining about cheating. You’re encouraging it. If you’re really concerned about cheating and you really want to stop or minimize it, then punish it severely. Fail the cheaters, at least on the exam, if not the class. The more severe the consequences, the less likely students are to do it.
You must make sure your students know exactly what your policy on cheating is, and what will happen to them if they cheat–and they have to know that you’re serious about your cheating policy.
Second, secure the exam. Take every precaution to see that it cannot fall into the hands of students before it is given. Don’t keep it on your hard drive at work. Instead, keep it on a flash drive that you have with you at all times, and password protect the exam file. Be present when the exam is printed (or if you use a printing service, when you give the file copy to the service and when it is delivered), take the exams as soon as they are printed, and lock them away so nobody can get to them. Tell nobody where the exams are secured. (If you think I’m being paranoid, one faculty member kept his exams locked in his filing cabinet in his office and told somebody else where they were. A student broke into his office, stole the exams, and sold them for five hundred dollars each. I know, because I wrote that exam, and we had to give the makeup version instead.)
Create more than one version of the exam (shuffling questions is fine). Before you go to the room to give the exam, have them arranged in alternating versions, and count your exams at least twice to make sure you know exactly how many you have. Know exactly how many students are in the room, and pass each exam out separately to each student; also make sure that each student has a different version than the adjacent student. Be careful that you do not accidentally give any student more than one exam. Count any remaining exams and do the math after you have passed them out and before you start the exam, just to make sure you did not accidentally give out an extra exam. If a student needs to leave the room during the administration of the exam, take his exam and all his materials while he is gone, and return them when he gets back (or don’t allow anyone to leave during the administration). Also secure the exam after it has been given. Do not allow students to pass the exam to you. You pick each one up individually, and make sure that you get an exam from every student. Before you let the students leave the room, count the exams and make sure you got every one of them. If an exam is missing, check the exams against the roster, figure out exactly which student did not give you an exam, and get it before you let the students leave the room.
Create a second exam with significantly different questions (not just shuffled questions) for any student that (for good reason, I hope) will take the exam early or late. Do not give that student the same exam you give during the regular administration.
If you give the same exams semester after semester and give exams back to students after they’ve been graded, you might as well just post the exam before they take it. Let students come to your office or room to go over their exams, but do not let them take the exam with them. If you give different exams every semester or year, you can let students take them, but because your exams are similar, it’s not the best idea.
Third, secure the exam site. If possible, spread the chairs as much as possible, or seat students in every other seat and every other row. Allow no additional materials of any kind (including dictionaries). Allow no electronic devices of any kind (no cell phones, electronic dictionaries, calculators, etc.) Have students check bags or backpacks at the front of the room and allow them only a pencil (or two) and nothing more (a piece of scratch paper is okay for certain exams, but only if you pick it up with the exams and do not allow students to take scratch paper out of the room). If you catch a student cheating, immediately pull his exam and eject him from the room. In the case of standardized exams, exam policy may override the above; I’ll address that below.
Fourth, actively proctor the exam. Don’t sit there. Don’t read. Don’t look out the window. Stay on your feet, walking up and down the aisles, watching all the students closely, and make sure they know you’re watching them and what will happen if you catch them cheating. Actively proctoring the exam probably does more to cut down on cheating than all the exam policies put together. The ratio of proctors to students in an exam room should never fall below 1:30, so if you have 40 students taking an exam, you should have two proctors in the room.
Take the exams immediately back to a secure area and lock them up. Keep them locked up unless you’re grading them. After you’ve graded them, if a student wants to look at his exam, get it out before he comes, and put it away after he leaves. Do not take it out of the locked filing cabinet (or wherever it is) while he is present so he can see where the exams are kept. A copy of an exam, graded or not, is worth a great deal of money to that student, even if he has already taken it.
When you do catch cheaters, it is imperative that you do not budge from the policy, no matter what the student’s excuse may be. If it gets out that you let a cheater off easy, more students will cheat. Be cold. Stick to your guns. The policy is absolute, and is not subject to “special conditions.” Have no sympathy. Students will not take cheating seriously if you don’t, and if you make allowances for cheaters, you’re not taking cheating seriously. If you’re the bleeding heart type, when cheaters give you sob stories, think of the students who worked their butts off studying for the exam, and how unfair it would be to them to give this little pondscum cheater a break.
If you’re proctoring a standardized exam and not your own, then the agency giving the exam will have their own policies. Make sure students know exactly what those policies are, just as you would if you were giving your own exam, and enforce them strictly. Again, proctor actively as students take the exam.
Unfortunately, you can’t do as much about cheating if your program, department, or administration won’t back you or your policies. You can still secure exams and the room, and you can still proctor actively, and that counts for a good deal. But as long as students get the message that cheating is okay, which they do every time some cheater gets off the hook easy, or teachers do little to ensure no cheating takes place, not only will they continue to cheat, but more students will follow suit.
rightwingprof :: Dec.02.2008 :: Education :: 13 Comments »
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Thanks for the info. I guess student attitudes like those described in the article effectively obviate any type of honor system. My school employed an honor system and I never dreamed of even glancing at someone else’s paper during a test. In fact, profs or instructors generally didn’t even stay in the classroom during tests or exams. Those were the days of “ditto sheets” and slide rules. Times change, often for the worse. These dishonest brats are a product of modern parenting and that is undoubtedly THE major contributor to such sorry-assed attitudes. Oh, yeah: you are also spot-on in your assessment of “diversity”. Thank God I’m retired and no longer have to take mandatory “diversity” or “EEO” classes.
go read this now. stephen small [univ wisc, madison] is doing some great research debunking the self esteem myth.
http://www.uwex.edu/news/2008/10/self-esteem-not-always-the-antidote-to-teens-problem-behavior
here’s a clip:
“Many drug and alcohol prevention programs make an effort to build self-esteem on the theory that youth who feel good about themselves will have less desire to use alcohol and other drugs,” says Stephen Small, human development and family relations specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Extension and director of the UW-Madison Center for Excellence in Family Studies. “However, research over the past ten years has found that having high self-esteem is not necessarily the panacea that it has often been made out to be.”
If you give different exams every semester or year, you can let students take them, but because your exams are similar, it’s not the best idea.
This one puzzles me. In NZ at my university all the exams from past years for all the subjects that had exams were kept at the university library for study reference. Our lecturers told us to do past exam questions as part of studying. Similarly, past questions from high school exams were available publicly, including in our textbooks. And of course the exams were generally similar from year to year. Yet people failed exams all the time, and our marks in the final exams generally varied as we expected from our knowledge of our fellow students.
With this background, I can’t figure out why you think that passing out old exams might not be the best idea.
People failed exams because they didn’t study the previous ones. As for security, providing prior exams is sheer idiocy. What’s the point of it, except to give students a way to pass a class without having attended?
People failed exams because they didn’t study the previous ones.
Actually I passed my environmental economics exam despite it being offered for the first time ever that year. I also passed the macro-economics exam despite it being completely different from the preivous years’ ones. So it wasn’t strictly necessary to study previous exams to pass the course.
More generally, if people don’t study for exams, what’s wrong with them consequently failing the exam?
As for security, providing prior exams is sheer idiocy. What’s the point of it, except to give students a way to pass a class without having attended?
Providing practice questions for people studying for the exams. How do students study for exams in the USA? Serious question here.
[We don’t just give (or take) exams. By the time students take the exam, they have taken a whole battery of quizzes, and done an even larger number of assignments. Where are you from?]
I don’t know anyone who passed the exams at university without attending classes. But if someone could do that, either the exam is way too simple or we are talking about a mega-genius.
[Not if the professor gives more or less the same exam every semester — which many do — and makes those exams available for students to study. Some do that, too, but a PhD has never been an indicator of high intelligence or principles.]
I’m really confused here. How is it non-secure to provide copies of old exams, if you are presenting new ones every year? About the only hypothetical scenario I can come up with is a course on lock-picking where the professor used his safe’s lock as an example in an old exam. I suppose there could be similar examples from computer security courses.
[See the last answer. It’s extremely common here for faculty to give more or less the same exam every semester, mostly out of sheer laziness.]
Apart from these scenarios, doesn’t publishing old exams make life fairer for students who don’t cheat? There’s always a chance that a student will get hold of an old exam accidentally. If the old exams are publicly available the would-be cheater can get no advantage over the honourable student by that method at least.
The point of providing prior exams is to give students practice questions to assist them in their studying.
[No, it isn’t. It’s to give students a way to pass the class without learning the material.]
In the courses I did we were expected to not merely write down what was covered in class, but to be able to apply that information to new problems. For example, for my first science exam at high school, the curriculum said we had to cover air circulation, inter alia, and one of the questions in the exam the year I took it required us to apply our knowledge about air circulation to an underground mine. This required being able to apply the principles of air circulation to a new situation (different situations were used in the past exams). I don’t know about you, but I often find I need to practice a new skill several times before I can answer slightly different questions. When you say “People failed exams because they didn’t study the previous ones” that sounds to me like it should just be truncated to “People failed exams because they didn’t study.”
[Studying the exams is not studying the material, nor is learning only the material that will appear on the exams learning the material.]
Serious question - how do students in the USA study for exams?
And how does providing past exams reduce security? Leaving aside unusual situations like a lock-picking course where the professor used his office safe’s lock as an example in a past exam.
[If you write a wholly different exam every semester, it doesn’t. Few do.]
If you keep past exams locked up there is always a risk that a student will get hold of an old copy, so you risk cheaters having an advantage over honourable students. If all past exams are publicly available, the cheaters don’t get any fair advantage.
[We keep exams for a calendar year, then shred them.]
Isn’t the primary purpose of education for students to learn the material, and exams to verify they’ve learned it? Why does it matter whether they learn it in class or in the library? Who cares if they “attended”? (Perhaps this varies by subject. Count attendance or class participation in their grade if it’s important.)
[Spot studying exams to see what questions will be asked isn’t learning the material. It’s learning what will be on the exam.]
A more important consideration is that inspecting past exams tells the students that certain topics, or certain types of questions, aren’t going to appear on the exams, so they don’t have to bother to study those. But it’s pretty difficult to prevent them from knowing that, whether they can see past exams or not.
[In other words, you’re saying that it’s fine if students do not learn the material — just what will be tested.]
I get the impression that your objective isn’t to maximize learning, but to maximize the fail rate. Surely catching cheaters isn’t the ONLY motivation for teachers’ choices.
[You’re an asshole.]
I’m a laboratory instructor for senior engineering students. No exams do we give, but the writing of numerous technical reports can represent a distinct opportunity for students to plagiarize. Indeed, during my first two years as an instructor, I submitted no less than three student pairs to the Dean of Students for potential disciplinary action based on rock-solid evidence. (BTW, the Internet makes plagiarism detection a stronger tool than plagiarism itself, in my view.) Since then, we’ve moved from task-oriented assignments with a static body of theory to open-ended problems where the relevant theory and methods must be identified ad hoc and/or developed by the students themselves. Not only are critical thinking skills taxed and grown better now, but plagiarism has disappeared as no two of these problems are ever identical.
In my view, it’s necessary but insufficient to call students to high values: one should also reduce the driving forces that facilitate poor choices like plagiarism and exam cheating.
I just found this blog … it’s a hoot. I love it!
Hmm, it sounds like the US system has very repetitive exams from year to year.
Yes, in NZ we did assignments. But the assignments were mostly on different things to written exams (eg labwork, project management, research papers). Quizzes weren’t used much. And, at high school, the exams were written by an external authority, so if the exam questions weren’t released then how would the teachers themselves know what was being taught?
Also, how does the USA have quality control on the exam questions if they are not released publicly? In NZ, if there was a badly written exam question it was front page news for the national newspapers. That’s one hell of an incentive for the examiners to write good questions.
Typically, the past exams would contain enough variety in questions to cover the entire course content. Eg for the science exam I was talking about, air circulation was one of the minor topics and wasn’t asked in every exam, *but* we didn’t know ahead of time if a question would be asked on this topic, so the student going after an “A” had to study air circulation and all the other minor topics anyway. (Major topics were things like velocity and acceleration, there would always be questions on those, but what the questions were varied).
[We keep exams for a calendar year, then shred them.]
So there’s a whole extra year of security risk, relative to releasing them openly after the exam.
As for lazy professors, I don’t believe that NZ professors are any better people than Americans (in fact, a lot of the lecturers at my engineering school were American or Canadian). Releasing the exams publicly meant a big incentive for them to write new exams each year, and they did so. Though a number of lecturers did have one of the questions being the same every year (generally worth something like 5% or 10%), as a graduate student I learnt that at least one benefit of this system was that the lecturers could then at the staff club boast about what percentage of their students couldn’t even get that question right. Perhaps the ability to boast was the main benefit. :)
I am really surprised that US academics are giving exams which your students can pass without actually needing to know the material behind it. What do American exam questions look like? And what’s the point of writing exams that don’t test what’s actually covered in the course? (Allowing of course for some variety in the topics covered by the questions each year, and excluding of course those skills, like labwork, that can’t be tested in a paper exam).
Teachers’ tests vary wildly in difficulty. Accesss to previous exams is incredibly beneficial to students because it lets them know what they are expected to have learned in the class. Nothing is more frustrating to a student than spending a large amount of time studying one thing, only to get a test with the emphasis on a different area.
Tracy -
If the exams created by that external authority are actually testing a defined subject area, then why would the instructors need the exact questions in order to teach that subject?
On the other hand, I have no problem with instructors creating new tests every year and having all the prior years’ tests available. If the students were able to remember how to solve a particular type of problem, that means they understand that type of problem.
Of course, that’s for real subjects that have real solutions. If you get into softer fields, History, basketweaving and such, then I can see you’d have to design the test to whatever you planned to instruct.
As far as attending class and passing exams, the smarter the student, and the more objective the material being tested (say, Algebra), then the less the person actually has to attend lectures to be able to learn the material. Attendance becomes necessary to the degree that the Instructor’s personal opinions and choices will blur or alter the material. There were lots of college courses that I got A’s in when my attendance was… spotty, shall we say.
If the exams created by that external authority are actually testing a defined subject area, then why would the instructors need the exact questions in order to teach that subject?
My apologies, I see that I typed the wrong word earlier. I should have said “And, at high school, the exams were written by an external authority, so if the exam questions weren’t released then how would the teachers themselves know what was being *tested?*” My mistake.
If teachers don’t know what questions are being asked, it adds a random factor into the testing results - the teachers who happen to hit on the precise skills that are being tested will presumably have students who perform better than equally-skilled teachers who didn’t manage to guess right.
One important factor in the testing was the relative weights given to different topics. One purpose of the high school exams was to produce a range of results so that the restrictive university courses had a basis for picking students, so the curriculum would cover more material than an average student could learn to mastery in one year. Therefore where teachers put the bulk of their effort mattered for the class’s average exam results.