The honor council at my institution is putting together a guide for faculty to combat cheating. I imagine that that most faculty members are unaware of the creative ways that students cheat these days, but I am certain that CC readers have some good stories. Most of our cases are routine. About half involve plagiarism. Many others involve copying a classmate’s answers, and a few involve changing answers after a test or problem set has been graded. Cheat sheets of various forms (on hands, on arms, inside baseball caps, on or in labels on soft drink bottles, etc.) appear occasionally.
Recently, students have taken to downloading course materials to their phones or accessing material from the web during exams. I would be curious to hear of other methods that take advantage of new technology.
A colleague experienced a variant of the copying trick this semester. A student could not see the answer sheet of the student in front, so he held up his cell phone and took a picture.
My most intricate cases have involved students who alter answers. One semester, after midterm grades had been posted online, my TA got an e-mail from a student claiming that we had posted the wrong grade (53 vs. 93). The TA asked the student to bring us the exam. She stalled, but once it became clear that I would not change her grade without seeing the exam, she relented. I stared at her exam for a while. Eventually, it hit me that her exam had been hand-stapled, with the staple on a diagonal, whereas the department photocopier put staples parallel to the long edge of the paper. My guess is that she whited out all of the answers on her exam, and made a clean copy. She then wrote in answers (probably copied from a friend’s exam) and grading marks.
I had a few extra copies of the exam, and several students had not picked up their exams, so we had a good set against which to compare hers. She never admitted what she had done, even though there were several anomalies. (Her exam had a couple of distinctive marks on every page because of dirt on the photocopier that she used, the weight of the paper was different, etc.)
A lot of faculty take measures against this. In an uber-large course when I was a TA, students had to show their ID and sign in before they took the exam. In my own classes, I usually know most of the students by the time of the first exam.
My students who copy from each other are generally to inept to find someone who is actually getting the right answers to copy from. It’s the blind leading the blind.
A student who wants to cheat is almost surely far ahead of most faculty members in terms of knowing the tricks. It is hard to keep up with the technology. Amazon sells “cheating watches,” which it describes as having a “much smaller thinner and lighter design … making it hard to spot during exams.” Given the arms race, the more we know about the creative ways that students are cheating, the more able we are to thwart their attempts.
@romanigypsyeyes: I just talked to the head of the honor council today. She has access to all of the cases and is putting together a list of methods from those cases. The problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. For instance, it was only recently that I learned firsthand that a student could “back date” an email. In December, the student claimed we had not given him credit for a November problem set. He then forwarded a November e-mail with his answers, which looked very similar to the solutions I had posted. It turns out that he had written the e-mail in December, changed the date, and then forwarded it. He almost got away with it. This is the kind of trick that most of us would not catch. (It helps to be married to a computer scientist.)
I went to a private school that was geared towards getting students into top tier schools. There was this pencil thing. If you needed help with number 3 tap three times. If the answer is A, a person points their pencil straight up. it rotates for other answers.
only works for multiple choice, but it was very successful around the jock types.
The mods have agreed that this is OK to stay. It really does no good to hide it, putting everything out in the open is the best choice usually. Hopefully teachers Googling cheating methods will see this and be alerted to methods they may not have been aware of. Cheaters are going to find the information they want anyway. Sometimes for decorum there are topics we won’t allow, and certainly direct cheating itself isn’t allowed. But this is clearly a topic highly related to academia.
HS kids were caught cheating by hacking into the school’s computer system and changing their grades. They even took money from other students to change their grades. One student had attached something to a computer that gave him access.
Maybe we should ask the casino police how people cheat there. Using technology to cheat on exams doesn’t seem all that different!
Feeling like I need to wash my hands after reading some cheating descriptions in this thread. Applaud the whistleblowers, though. Cheaters deserve punishment.
One thing teachers can do is to require that phones be placed face down in the corner of the desk. I think the fact that most schools require phones to be out of sight makes it easier to cheat. After all if the student is cagey enough to keep the phone hidden he can use it to cheat. If the phone is in sight, face down any attempt to touch the phone is easily visible.
^ Or stowed and silenced if the class is too large for this to be practical. There should be no reason for a student to have a cell phone out or in use while taking an exam.