Think Twice Before Cheating in Online Courses
Instructors can rattle off a number of reasons why online students should think twice about cheating: they learn less, they cheapen their credential and in some cases, they even get caught.
Still, the message falls on deaf ears.
"A lot of people cheat a little," says David Pritchard, a physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied academic dishonesty. "There's also a few people who cheat a lot."
Online students aren't more likely to violate rules than their on-campus counterparts, says Bernard Bull of Concordia University Wisconsin, who has studied cheating in online classrooms at two liberal arts colleges. Among those who admitted to cheating, about 40 percent reported doing so in online quizzes, says Bull, who serves as assistant vice president of academics. About 13 percent reported cheating on papers and the same percentage admitted to bending the rules in online discussion boards.
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Some experts suggest it's easier to cheat in online learning environments, since students can ask someone to take an exam for them or complete a test with the Internet at their fingertips.
"Students online, depending on the university, have good opportunities to cheat right now," says Fred Stielow, who helped design cheating prevention tools at American Public University System. But the bad news for cheaters, he says, is that new tools are being developed that will make it even harder to swindle their way into a good grade.
Below are some of the current technologies instructors use to keep students in check.
[Learn new e-learning terms in our online education glossary.]
Proctoring: When students take exams in their own home, it can be hard for school officials to verify their identity. As a result, more schools are hiring companies that provide online proctoring during exams. Though the use a of a webcam, employees from the company can watch a student's face and computer screen as he or she takes the test. Before students start the exam, they have to show their driver's license or other proof of identity. ProctorU, one such company, works with more than 500 institutions, a spokeswoman said.
Despite using proctoring for a majority of final exams, Eric Friedman, associate director in the office of distance education at Boston University, says students still try to cheat on the tests. Some students try to put their notes outside of the camera's view, only to have their darting eyes give them away, he says. Other students have had friends hide in the room and read them answers or have staged an Internet connection loss to look up answers.
"We've seen some really creative approaches," he says.
Plagiarism detection software: The learning management systems online students use to submit their work increasingly come along with plagiarism detection software. One of the most well-known tools, Turnitin, scans vast amounts of Web content to determine whether a student's work matches existing material.
"It's glorious," says Jean Marrapodi, director of eLearning at New England College of Business and Finance. In her experience, most students caught by the technology aren't intentionally cheating, but rather don't understand how to correctly cite their sources.
Keystroke recognition devices: At Pace University, students have developed a keystroke recognition program that gives school officials another way to certify a student's identity, says Vinnie Monaco, a computer science graduate student spearheading the work.
Students first do typing exercises in which the computer measures the speed and rhythm of their typing. Officials can then monitor the typing in later assignments to see if the patterns match up.
Massive open online course provider Coursera is using this technology, as well as numerous other colleges, says Friedman with Boston University. In the future, he says, schools could start using other kinds of biometric technology, such as iris recognition or fingerprint identification, to prevent cheating.
Even when schools don't have access to keystroke recognition or biometric technology, students shouldn't assume they can deceive their instructors, experts say. School officials have another powerful cheating prevention tool at their disposal: common sense.
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At Boston University, for example, faculty and student coordinators closely monitor student work and use their own judgment to determine whether students are being honest, Friedman says.
"One of the red flags is if a student's writing changes from one discussion post to the next," he says. "We also look for somebody who is doing solid B-minus work in class but then aces the exam. Those are the things we look into."
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Devon Haynie is an education reporter at U.S. News, covering online education. You can follow her on Twitter or email her at dhaynie@usnews.com.
