May 2020
Letter from the Editor
The Age of Chegg et al. - The New Forms of Real-time Cheating on Final Exams
By Badri Roysam, University of Houston
Dear ECEDHA family and friends,
The ever-fecund internet seems to have taken real-time cheating on exams to a whole new level in the age of physical distancing. There are websites that offer paid real-time expert human help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Companies that run these websites are worth billions of dollars, suggesting the magnitude of this activity. Given that a final exam is typically 3 hours long, some students are tempted to seek help from these websites in real time, even as they are being proctored via webcams.
It is time for our faculty and teaching assistants to wake up to these newly recognized threats to academic integrity. We must learn from our mistakes from the Spring semester, and develop effective ways to battle them in time for the Summer and Fall semesters.
The maintenance of academic integrity is vital to our profession. Without this crucial standard, the degree certificates that we offer are essentially worthless.
In this issue of the Source, we boldly choose to open a Pandora’s Box of questions on Academic Integrity that badly need answers.
Invitation to a Discussion of Academic Integrity! ECEDHA is proud to introduce a Community Forum for members to hold spirited discussions on topics of their choosing. You are invited to discuss The Future of Academic Integrity on the new ECEDHA Community Forums. Here are some questions to get our discussion started:
- What new things have we learned during the Spring 2020 semester?
- What worked, and what didn’t?
- Is there a set of best practices that we can all adopt?
We have created a new Topic “The Future of Academic Integrity” on the ECEDHA forum. Click here for instructions on how to access this forum, and click here for a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the basics. Just remember to log in first, using the button on the upper-left corner of the ECEDHA website.
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Continued from the Source:
Cheating on exams is a human activity that is as old as education itself. While the majority of students are honest, there is always a persistent minority that is prone to adopting dishonest means to achieve a better grade. As our profession has evolved over time, so have the tools and methods of cheating. This evolution appears to have taken a rapid turn as we were suddenly compelled to teach online this past semester.
The ever-fecund internet seems to have taken real-time cheating on exams to a whole new level. I personally came face-to-face with this evil when a student reported to a faculty colleague that questions on a Final Exam were posted on a website named Chegg.com , a roughly $4B company. This website’s motto is “A Smarter Way to Student”. While a good part of this website is devoted to innocent and helpful learning tools like online textbooks, flash cards, question banks, and video tutorials, it also offers a 24/7 tutoring service that promises human help. This is the problematic part. Given that a final exam is typically 3 hours long, there is enough time for a student to take a screen shot of a question and post it on a website like Chegg (I am told that there are many other sites like this!).
On the bright side, Chegg.com takes academic honesty seriously. When contacted, they were forthcoming with a data table that revealed the activities of the “bad apples” in sufficient detail to permit prosecution under existing policies.
As we studied these data tables, we learned that this was a surprisingly widespread pastime that involved universities at all ranking levels. Another disturbing realization is that the existence of paid online helpers creates favors rich students over poor students. This realization shines a spotlight on the inequalities in our society at large. This is a rude awakening that is demoralizing faculty and students alike. It is also sowing distrust between faculty and students. We must battle these trends and level the playing field.
How are faculty members supposed to detect such violations of academic integrity?
Watching the activity on arcane websites is not our forte, and quite frankly, we don’t have the time, and are not equipped for such surveillance. However, we are very good at detecting similarly wrong answers. Specifically, when two or more students write the same wrong answer to a question, it is an unmistakable sign that some cheating may have occurred.
What should we be doing to prevent, or at least minimize online violations?
During this past semester, as our faculty members, many with no prior experience/interest in online teaching had to learn online pedagogies, their primary focus was on effective delivery of lectures via online media. They wanted to explain the subjects as clearly as possible. They worked hard on the nitty gritty of software tools like Zoom (battling zoom bombing attacks along the way), and effective ways to approximate the classroom-whiteboard experience. Rightly so, they were worried about ways to achieve good student engagement, since engagement is the fundamental basis for learning. We were also concerned about the limitations of equipment on the student side – did they have powerful-enough yet sufficiently affordable laptops, webcams, scanners, and printers? Did they have access to reliable internet service? Cheating was the last thing on the minds of most faculty members.
It is time for our faculty to wake up to these newly recognized threats to academic integrity, and develop effective ways to battle them in time for the Summer and Fall semesters. Like any disease, prevention is probably the best cure. Below is a short list of suggestions that we learned about. The best strategies aim to prevent violations from occurring in the first place.
1. Copyright the Exam Questions. An important lesson that we learned from interacting with the personnel at Chegg was that we were essentially dealing with their Copyright Infringement department. This makes sense, since the presence of copyrighted material on their website represents a corporate liability. Since this realization, we have started placing prominent copyright statements on the headers and footers of each page of our exams.
2. Make Students Aware of Online Site Surveillance. Explicitly announcing to the students that we are monitoring websites like Chegg during the exam, and warning them of consequences, can be helpful as a deterrent.
3. Use webcam monitoring. Requiring students to be visible on their webcam allows a reasonable level of protection during an exam, but will not prevent the student from accessing alternative websites.
4. Use a lockdown Browser. One such tool is the Respondus Lockdown Browser that increases the security of test delivery in Blackboard. When students use this browser, they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. Once an assessment is started, students are locked into it until it’s submitted for grading. This browser can be used on a student’s personal computer. The Lockdown Browser automatically generates a password which appears in the Blackboard TEST OPTIONS for the exam. Unfortunately, the lockdown browser will not prevent violations that can be implemented using a smartphone.
5. Provide less time for students to leverage online cheating methods. One simple preventative strategy is to dole out the exam questions to students one at a time. For example, commonly used Learning Management Systems like BlackBoard allow us to release a question, and only release the next question after the student has answered the first question. For example, a 3-hour exam with six questions will offer only about 30 minutes per question to the student, rather than the full 3 hours. By providing the paid helpers less time to answer a question, we can raise the stakes.
6. Vary the questions. A classic strategy is to have two or more variants of each question, by changing some of the parameters or the requested outcome, for example. This strategy works for online exams as well. It mainly protects against peer-to-peer communications.
7. Relative Grading. This is a classic strategy that works for online exams as well. When students have to compete for the best grade, there is less incentive for peer-to-peer answer sharing.
8. Error Baits. Questions with zero points that are specifically designed to detect cheating, if possible for a given subject/topic can be helpful.
Do you have other ideas to share?
You are invited to discuss The Future of Academic Integrity on the new ECEDHA Community Forums. Here are some questions to get our discussion started:
- What new things have we learned during the Spring 2020 semester?
- What worked, and what didn’t?
- Is there a set of best practices that we can all adopt?
We have created a new Topic “The Future of Academic Integrity” on the ECEDHA forum. Click here for instructions on how to access this forum, and click here for a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the basics. Just remember to log in first, using the button on the upper-left corner of the ECEDHA website.
The best strategy overall, is to have a healthy discussion of academic integrity among the faculty, and develop a suite of best practices to prevent violations.
On behalf of ECEDHA, we wish you and your family a safe and restful summer.
Thank you, and keep in touch! In my recent LinkedIn shout-out to our graduating students, I exhorted them with the following message
“Do Good, Do Well, Live Long, Prosper, and May the Force be with you!”
Since my encounters with Chegg et al., I would amend my message a bit, as follows:
“Be Honest, Do Good, Do Well, Live Long, Prosper, and May the Force be with you!”
Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu