Wired for Cheating

>From the issue dated July 16, 2004

Wired for Cheating

Some professors go beyond honor codes to stop misuse of electronic
devices

By BROCK READ

Last winter, when some graduate business students at the University of
Maryland at College Park accused classmates of cheating on a midterm
exam, a group of professors decided to take matters into their own
hands.

At the start of the final exam for "Principles of Accounting I," the
team of professors who taught the popular course posted on its Web site
an answer key loaded with false responses to the 30 multiple-choice
questions. As some 400 students deliberated over their answers, the exam
proctors sat and watched -- ignoring occasionally suspicious noises
coming from a few cellphones, according to some of the test takers.

When the professors then compared each student's paper with the false
key, they found that a dozen tests matched the fake answers almost
exactly. According to Howard Frank, dean of the business school, there
was only one reasonable explanation: 12 of the students had cheated.

All of the implicated students either admitted to using their
Internet-enabled cellphones to look up the answer key online, or were
convicted of having done so by a group of professors and students. Those
students received a grade signifying "failure due to academic
dishonesty."

The professors received a standing ovation at a faculty meeting, and Mr.
Frank called them "heroes" for executing the bold plan. But the "sting"
aspect of the exam touched off a minor controversy at College Park.
James Jones, director of the university's Student Legal Aid Office,
wrote a letter to the student newspaper calling the tactic "ethically
wrong." Some students speculated that the university might be vulnerable
to claims of entrapment.

The cellphone episode highlights what some professors and administrators
say is a growing problem on their campuses: More students are using
cellphones, personal digital assistants, and Internet-connected laptops
to cheat during exams. In small classrooms monitored by vigilant
proctors, the devices offer few real opportunities for cheating. But in
large courses like introductory accounting, technologies that were
initially thought of as merely distracting are now more likely to be
viewed as high-tech crib sheets.

With a cellphone or a PDA, an enterprising student can exchange notes
with other exam takers, receive text messages from classmates outside
the lecture hall, or search the Web. And the technology can make
cheaters hard to spot.

"I suspect that there is a lot of stuff going on that people don't know
about," says Mr. Frank, noting that professors at his institution had
banned electronic devices and given students several different sets of
exam questions even before the cellphone incident occurred.

"In retrospect, the cellphone thing has been a boon," according Mr.
Frank, because it led students to discuss the university's honor code --
and drove professors to enforce it more aggressively.

Many administrators elsewhere say their institutions are trying to
follow a similar course. Some are revisiting longstanding honor codes in
response to technology. Others are looking for technological solutions
to cheating, or are encouraging professors to set their own guidelines
for the use of technology during tests.

If cheating opportunities are not cut off in advance, they will prove
both convenient and tempting to students who would never think of, say,
surreptitiously writing notes on their hands, says Edmond S. Cooley, an
assistant professor of engineering and director of information
technology at Dartmouth College, who has used PDA's and tablet computers
in his courses for three years. "There's a little bit of larceny in
everybody," he says. "It's mostly just a question of, What's the price?"

Variety of Responses

While many faculty members say they are content to keep an eye on their
classrooms for evidence of untoward activity, some use more-aggressive
methods for combating high-tech cheaters. Among other steps, professors
may:

* Ban electronic equipment during exams. At College Park, more and
more professors flag their exams with warnings that any student in
possession of a cellphone or PDA will automatically fail, according to
Mr. Frank.
* Create multiple versions of a test. By now, most professors have
learned not to post answer keys -- either online or outside the
classroom -- until every student has completed the exam. But in some
large courses at the University of California at Berkeley, each student
receives an exam with multiple-choice questions in randomly generated
order. "No two students are getting the same test," says Alexander J.
Cuthbert, director of educational technology at Berkeley's Digital
Chemistry Project. Consequently, students who try to get around the
university's no-electronics policy won't be able to pass answer keys
back and forth on phones or PDA's.
* Embrace wireless
<http://www.adsrve.com/linkredirect.php?h=135,28514509,chronicle.com,0>
technology, but control it. For quizzes in his "Integrated Circuits"
course at Dartmouth, Mr. Cooley has had his students work on the PDA's
that they had used throughout the semester. He posted the tests on a
course Web site and designed an authentication code that allowed
students to view and complete the exams only when they logged on from
the proper classroom at a specific time. He says his system also keeps
students from hunting for answers on the Web while they are taking the
quiz.

Modified Honor

If they choose, professors at Dartmouth can even disable wireless
connectivity in the classroom, according to Mr. Cooley.

"Some universities are trying to shut off wireless," he says, "but you
have to be careful to make sure there's not one person in the back of
class who's getting reception."

Some colleges have acknowledged the ubiquity of electronic devices, as
well as concerns about cheating, by refocusing codes of academic
conduct.

Traditionally, most colleges with honor codes have let students take
their exams unsupervised. But at College Park, faculty members have
adopted what they call a "modified honor code," which requires that
every exam be proctored by a professor, who can watch for both high-tech
and low-tech forms of cheating. Students can also take an optional
pledge stating that they completed a test without any outside help.

But at Dartmouth, among other colleges, faculty members have endorsed
more-liberal codes, which ask each student to be responsible for his or
her own academic integrity and allow professors to set their own
guidelines for monitoring tests.

And nearly all institutions continue to let professors make and police
their own policies on the use of cellphones and PDA's during tests.

Mr. Cooley says Dartmouth's academic honor code and its provisions on
computer use in and out of the classroom adequately cover concerns about
high-tech cheating. "By and large," he says, "professors are given a
free hand in how they choose to administer exams."

High-tech cheating is yet another reason for colleges without honor
codes to adopt them, says Donald L. McCabe, a professor of organization
management at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who founded the Center
for Academic Integrity, a research center in Durham, N.C. "I'm a big
believer that what we need to do is engage students in a dialogue about
cheating," he says. "The research I've done suggests that honor codes
have reduced the level of cheating almost everywhere they've been
applied."

Just how widespread is such technological abuse? That's hard to say,
according to Jason Stephens, a research assistant at the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. But the potential for
electronic cheating is considerable.

A Culture of Cheating?

In a recent survey, Mr. Stephens found that about two-thirds of
high-school students admit to at least minor cheating on quizzes and
tests, and he estimates that college students are not far behind. While
most students acknowledge that cheating is wrong, many find ways to
justify subterfuge in their own work, he says.

"Technology further facilitates that sort of rationalization," he says.
"Students can say, 'Why should I be forced to memorize a fact or a
formula when I'm going to have this information at my fingertips
online?'"

Survey courses, Mr. Stephens says, may be particularly tempting targets
for technology-savvy students because the classes are harder to police
and feature fairly objective grading standards. By the time most
students get to college, he argues, they have already used the Internet,
if not portable devices, to cut corners on tests and assignments.

"I'd say that between laptops, cellphones, PDA's, and pagers, probably
95 percent of my students come in to class with some type of electronic
device," says Gwen Griffin, a professor of English at the University of
Minnesota at Mankato. "Our students are in an age group where they've
grown up with this technology and they don't know any different, so you
can't just eliminate it completely."

Few institutions release the details of student-conduct hearings, so it
is difficult to determine how many accusations of cheating involve
electronic technology.

Last year a small number of students at DePaul University were tried for
cheating with PDA's, and a student at the University of Chicago was
alleged to have used a variety of machines to steal answers to exams.

Representatives of both universities declined to comment on the cases.

Some professors have banned wireless devices from class altogether --
not because of the prospect of cheating, but simply because they are
distracting.

"It's become a cultural issue, much like using a cellphone in a
restaurant," says Mr. Cooley, noting that professors aren't the only
ones who don't want cellphones or PDA's in the classroom. "Students have
pushed back against the use of laptops and cellphones in the classroom
because that's just a lot of noise."

At Mankato, Ms. Griffin added a clause to each of her syllabi
prohibiting electronic devices because students complained that their
peers' computerized note taking and PDA game playing was making it hard
to follow her lectures. Since she banned the devices, she says, she has
had few complaints.

"I used to have my share of problems with students playing games on
their PDA's," she says. "One student actually had headphones on while he
was using his in class. I asked him what he was doing, and he told me he
was taking notes."

At the time, however, she hadn't yet started her lecture.

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