In recent years, it seems that the radio dial on ethics is moving up and down the spectrum. Ethical behavior, intentional or not, is at the root of cheating. This episode of The Score explores how our guest, Garret Merriam (@SisyphusRedemed), an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Sacramento State University in California, responded to widespread cheating on a final exam in his Introduction to Ethics course.

High points of the conversation follow. Note: Removal of filler words and minor edits have been made for clarity.

Kathryn Baron (01:33): Would you tell us what happened in your Intro to Ethics class?

Garret Merriam (01:42): I came to suspect that some students in my class might've been cheating on my final by Googling the answers on the final. I teach a course that's fully online, has almost a hundred students, and with that much material, that many students going on, it simply isn't possible for me to create novel finals every semester, as much as I would like to do that. I reuse large portions, though never the entire thing, of my final. And so, I found that by Googling the questions on my final, you could come up with a student who had uploaded a copy of the final with many of the correct answers to the questions.
I made the request of the website, called Quizlet, that they take it down, and I was very pleasantly surprised that they did so promptly and quickly. I was under the impression, I was assuming that they weren't going to respond, but they did. I was very grateful for that, very professional of them on their side of things.

And then after that, a part of me, perhaps somewhat of a devious part, I suppose, decided to run a little experiment. Part of my research is in experimental philosophy, and I like running experiments, and so I decided to see what would happen if I uploaded a copy of my final with the right questions but the wrong answers.

Garret Merriam (03:01):…After the final was complete, I ran a statistical analysis and found out that approximately 40 of the 96 students cheated on the final.

Garret Merriam (3:35): And this understandably created a bit of havoc both for me, for my students, for my department, and a number of people who became a part of this conversation going forwards.

Kathryn Baron (03:47): When you learned that a student had put the test up on Quizlet, how did you know that the students in your current class had copied it?

Garret Merriam (03:54): What initially led me to be suspicious was a mistake that I had made earlier in the semester. Every week, I upload a reading and a reading quiz, and the idea is they do the reading, and they take the reading quiz just to make sure to put a little pressure on them to incentivize them to actually do the reading. And one week I neglected to upload the reading, but did upload the reading quiz, and then a few hours later I realized my mistake and I went, and I uploaded the reading. But when doing so, I noticed that some of the students had already taken the reading quiz and had gotten a perfect score on it.

Garret Merriam (04:37):….That was hardly proof of anything, but it was enough to make me suspicious. It was enough to make me concerned that something would've been going on. So, I Googled those quiz questions, and sure enough, I found the copy of them on Quizlet.

Kathryn Baron (05:49): I read that you contacted the students suspected of cheating. How did that go?
Garret Merriam (6:04):…I put together sort of a blank form letter in which I contacted them and said that I have reason to believe that they had cheated on the final and a few more details without tipping my hand completely. And I sent that out to all of the suspected students.
And somewhere in the ballpark of about two thirds of them got back to me right away and confessed and said that yes, they had cheated, they were apologetic, some of them made excuses, others just asked for understanding and forgiveness, and about one third of them denied it.
And then about half of that third then turned around within 24 hours and even before I got back to them and said, "Okay, you know what? I actually, no, I changed my mind. I'm going to confess.” So, all of this very much reassured my confidence that my method was working here. And of the remainders, some of them, as far as I know to this day, still insist on their innocence. I'd handed things over to the administration at my university.

Kathryn Baron (07:59): Do you have any input into what action the university takes?
Garret Merriam (08:03): I get to determine the penalty as far as my class is concerned. All of the students who did this at the very least got an F on the final.

Kathryn Baron (10:33): I have heard of instances where some professors think, "Well, that would never happen in my class," and I'm wondering if you received any feedback like that, sort of implying that you must have done something not quite right as a teacher for students to cheat.

Garret Merriam (10:49): It's certainly tempting to think, and obviously there is some truth to that. The room for this kind of thing is going to vary depending on a lot of details about a particular instructor's class. To take the most obvious example, if you're not reusing material like I was, then you're not going to be encountering this particular problem.
While none of my colleagues gave that particular response, if there's anyone out there listening, I can certainly imagine that that might be a justified response. However, at the same time, there can be a kind of certain amount of arrogance and maybe laziness that might come along with that too, to think that the problem is something specific about the individual instructor, in this case me, rather than something that is a little bit more systemic.
Again, I want to give credit to professors and other instructors who have found ways to effectively discourage cheating, but I would also say you shouldn't rest on your laurels and recognize that it is, I think, a best practice to double-check your methods and your sources and to find out in any way you can, whether or not there actually is academic dishonesty going on. You should not simply assume that you are one of the fairly small percentage of instructors who has managed to stamp out academic dishonesty in their ranks completely.

Garret Merriam (12:13): The irony of cheating on an ethics final is something that was not lost on me, and I tried to impose that recognition on all the students who I communicated with as well.

Kathryn Baron (12:21): You did reach out to other colleagues and peers around the country on the online philosophy journal called the Daily Nous, that's spelled N-O-U-S, which I read is ancient Greek for intellect or understanding. What feedback were you looking for and did you get it?

Garret Merriam (12:38): It actually started on Twitter. I have a fairly modest Twitter presence, but a lot of fellow philosophers follow me, and I follow them. And so I post about the experience and Twitter being Twitter, everything was condensed and a lot of detail was washed out, so I think a lot of people didn't possibly fully understand exactly what I did and what my reaction to it was. So, someone with a larger following retweeted it with criticism and a lot of people started to jump on and accused me of engaging in dishonesty myself. The most common criticism is a kind of entrapment, that I encouraged or enabled students to cheat and then punished them for doing so.

Garret Merriam (14:07): I wanted to try to filter the audience down to people who at least had some experience with the kind of thing I was talking about.
…It became a very, very populous discussion, which I was fascinated to participate in, and the results were somewhat mixed. I think a lot of the people, once they got the full picture, recognized that I hadn't engaged in anything majorly morally problematic, and in particular the charge of entrapment was ill-placed. At the same time, several people did criticize, and I think quite fairly, some of the particular ways I went about it, acknowledging that there was things that I could have done better. And I took a lot of that to heart and plan on trying to incorporate some of those criticisms and some of those pieces of advice going forward…

Kathryn Baron (15:06): I'm curious about what parts of the plan do you think were flawed and what did you decide to do differently going forward? And I guess this could be a time to bring in that you actually did try this again with a summer school class. What was different?

Garret Merriam (15:41): For starters, one thing which I did not realize when I reached out to these students and accused them of cheating was that for many of these students, websites like Quizlet are not thought of as forms of academic dishonesty, but just tools that students can use on the internet to study. Several of my students' claims, and I have no reason not to believe them, that they were just looking for study guides.

Garret Merriam (16:48): To preempt that, I made a change to the syllabus, the academic dishonesty section of the syllabus, and I had a small, recorded lecture on academic honesty, and I made it explicit that the use of websites like Quizlet were not acceptable for the purposes of this class. There may be, and I think there probably are, legitimate uses for websites like that, but I told my students that especially when it comes to the final, all that they need is the material that I hand them and any notes that they have taken over the course of the semester. And that if they start looking online, they risk the possibility of coming across material which qualifies as academically dishonest.
I also, in addition to that, put two new questions at the start of the final. The very first one was whether or not using websites like Quizlet qualified as academic dishonesty and what should happen to students who cheat on their ethics final.

Garret Merriam (18:00): I deployed this new material for my summer session, which had a total of 29 students. Every single student got those first two questions on the final right, so they were paying enough attention to follow through on that. But in spite of this, I still had three students who cheated, three students who looked up the Quizlet and found it. So that's an improvement on some metrics. I fell from about 40% down to about 10%, so that's encouraging. At the same time, again, I reached out to these three students, and I genuinely tried to understand, I did everything I could to impress upon them that using these resources qualified as academic dishonesty. I tried to get their buy-in to say they wouldn't do this. And in spite of that, three students still did.

Kathryn Baron (23:30): Do you feel that cheating is getting the attention of the wider higher ed community that it deserves? Are there discussions underway in universities, professional associations, and accrediting agencies to identify steps that colleges and universities can take?

Garret Merriam (23:47): Obviously, the 900-pound elephant in the room for academic honesty is large language models like ChatGPT. That has been getting a tremendous amount of attention, and I think rightfully so. I have my students write essays, and I've been concerned about that. There are tools and countermeasures to try to check for that, but they're far from perfectly reliable. It just so happened that this particular instance is not one that had anything to do with artificial intelligence. This was just standard Google and academic websites like Quizlet. I do think that there should be more discussion about websites like that, in no small part just so professors could be more informed about it. Again, I had the assumption, which is no doubt true for some of these websites, that like you said, that it's a purely for-profit, that they will pay students with credits or something like that for turning in and sharing information.

Garret Merriam (25:27 )…Students are very, very internet savvy. And while I consider myself reasonably internet savvy myself, I know a lot of my colleagues are a little bit older than I am, and even the younger ones aren't always as online and as plugged in, and even those who are, aren't always aware of all the possible resources out there that students can use to cheat. So, a broader conversation amongst academia and amongst professional teachers, again, if for no other reason than to draw awareness to these resources, I think is something that is important.

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

The Score is a 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.

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.

-

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.

-

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."

-

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.