To Catch a Cheat

Educators Study Online Dishonesty

New York Times       August 2, 2013

FOR his recent MOOC, "Understanding Cheating in Online Courses," Bernard Bull asked his students to share their stories. Cut-and-paste still rules, he found, but with a global twist that trips up plagiarism-detection software. Students are finding papers online in another language and running them through Google Translate.

Dr. Bull, an administrator and professor of educational design and technology at Concordia University, near Milwaukee, offered his massive open online course on the Canvas Network to 1,000 participants, mostly educators looking for ways to mitigate cheating in their courses.

(One guest speaker was from Software Secure, which proctors online exams and has started a program that certifies courses for "best practices in academic integrity." Just look for the "Trusted Seal.")

But while the rise in online education has meant many more ways to be academically dishonest and led to much hand-wringing, no conclusive study shows a cheating epidemic, said Donald L. McCabe, a Rutgers professor and a co-author of the recently published "Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It."

Cheating frequency hasn't changed much over the decades, at least as reported in student surveys. And that's the problem. Classic cheating behavior - like talking about what's on a test or cribbing a sentence - is "no big deal anymore," Dr. McCabe said. And "students are less honest in filling in a survey today than historically." That is, they cheat.

Skipping Class (All of Them)

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