But, wait a minute, any good educator might pause. We’re living in 2011, in an education world of portfolios and more relevant, differentiated assessments — ones replacing the prosaic reports of old with personalized assignments — a generic report on a particular country in Asia is now replaced with a researched commentary such as, “If you had to explore any Asian country which would it be and why?”
These “cutting edge” educational approaches should circumvent all those cheating opportunities, right? Wrong. In fact, the nature of information today allows for students to cheat even easier on portfolios and many non-traditional assessments since the Internet caters to providing such material.
Simply put, the most essential skill for most students, critical thinking, can be relegated as academically irrelevant by Web sites that offer analysis — for free and for payment — without the student thinking for even a moment. Unfortunately, we must confront the stark reality that just because we might have made the assignment more engaging and valuable doesn’t change the students’ ability to cheat on it.
The Technological Paradox
The challenges of cheating today confronts the educator with a thorny paradox: the very technologies that educators need to embrace on so many levels in order to help guide students through research and information synthesis, can serve to undermine learning on other levels.
In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair ,and as a result, not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word, Shirley Jackson’s story “Charles,” except for changing the title character’s name. I guess she thought I wouldn’t have a chance hunting down the story once she cleverly renamed her story “Bob.” Alas, catching a cheater is not so easy anymore.
A few years ago, students would write the answers on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions before they walk into the classroom.
Now catching the cheaters requires a level of vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.
Today, students wouldn’t have to rely merely on CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes, PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google “Hamlet Essay,” and you’ll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first page of which is teeming with free essays.
Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine to discover the source. And such Web sites as Turnitin.com, which checks student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy, that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of teachers.
Keeping Evaluations in the Classroom
Of course, even in this technological age, some students are so lazy they won’t even bother to match the font and the type size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a Web site. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.
Yet, we can’t count on incompetence. Many students are so wily and crafty that they’ve learned to mask their cheating to impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.
So what must educators do? Start with limiting most evaluations to the classroom. Home assignments allow students to run amok with Internet materials. The legwork required to check assignments for plagiarism can siphon away a teacher’s time from doing the real work of teaching — preparing lessons and evaluating student work. By taking evaluations in the classroom, students are much more limited in how they can cheat, especially if teachers follow basic rules: all electronic devices must be put away, all hands must be above the desk, and students must remain in the classroom until the test is done. Obviously, teachers have to adjust for exceptions. For example, for exams that require calculators, teachers should wipe out memories as enterprising students have been known to program answers into the calculators.
In addition, teachers can challenge students by examining the very “study aids” at the core of a cheater’s success. When concerned that many students are reading a SparkNotes summary rather the actual text of Hamlet, a teacher can quote a few lines of that summary on a test and ask students “to describe what SparkNotes left out of this section of the play.”
Yes, these remedies for cheating have drawbacks, like expending more valuable class time on evaluations. Furthermore, the teacher is now spending more time policing the course and less time engaging in meaningful dialogue or facilitating critical thinking. Are there other methods to cut down on cheating? Of course, and many of them have to do with creating highly original and often individualized assignments. Unfortunately, these methods often can drain the broader, synthesized analysis from a course, so the teacher must perform a tricky balancing act.
For at-home essays on novels, I often assign 30 different commentaries for my 30 students to discourage the wholesale cheating that can often occur when these assignments have one or two options. And yes, those 30 different responses can provide a rich dialogue in the classroom. However, I cannot be so naïve as to believe all those students were equally denied cheating opportunities. I would bet five or six of those assignments have plenty web essays from which to draw. Next year, I hope to cut down on those “individualized” cheating opportunities by honing these assignments, hoping to improve the odds that the students are thinking for themselves. Similarly, I can carefully monitor students on their work for research papers step-by-step to assure they are doing their work from gathering data to writing each section, preventing a “wonderful” copied paper from miraculously finding its way onto my desk on the due date.
All these approaches to cheating are far removed from a “Gotcha” mentality in which a teacher is trying to catch students in the act. Instead, the effort must be proactive. As educators, we are going to approach how to teach and evaluate in this high tech world from many different angles. Only if the evaluations compel students to learn the skills and the material will cheating be reined in. Until then, true ability, knowledge, and wisdom will remain at students’ fingertips rather than in their brains.