College students cheating: "the number of students engaging in academic dishonesty during the coronavirus pandemic is soaring"

✅The real devil behind rise in academic cheating during pandemic isn't online learning: expert 

(National Post, Devika Desai, May 28, 2021) 

Sarah Eaton, a professor at the University of Calgary, said she has seen increases in cheating from about 40 per cent to over 200 per cent, based on reports published by schools across the country. 

It’s not just Canada — other countries around the world have reported similar increases since the beginning of the pandemic. “The pandemic has really affected how we teach and learn,” she said. “It’s impacted all aspects of education.” 

But online learning isn’t to blame, she said, having long researched academic misconduct in Canadian post-secondary institutions. 

“There was about 20 years of research before the pandemic that showed that there was less academic misconduct in online courses compared to face-to-face learning.” 

Rather, she said, it’s the fact that students were “forced into online learning when they didn’t want to be,” coupled with teachers who are inexperienced and “not well trained in how to deliver their classes in online learning.” 

“You can have an awesome online learning experience, and you can have a terrible online experience,” she said. “But I think during the pandemic, students have not generally had awesome online experiences, unless they were working with a teacher who already knew how to teach online.” 

As a result, students become easy prey for a US$15 billion global industry specializing in “contract cheating,” Eaton said. Contract cheating is when a student outsources their assignment to someone else in exchange for a fee — in many cases, underpaid ghostwriters for companies in the business of cheating. 

With little to no legislation policing their actions, these companies are free to advertise their services to students, lure them in and keep them indebted via aggressive marketing tactics and sometimes blackmail, she said. 

. . . 

Going online makes it easier for students to cheat, intentionally or unintentionally, through certain behaviours that dominate digital interactions — the tendency to share for example, Eaton posited. 

People online share everything, ranging from memes and photos to status updates, which could very well translate to sharing academic work and test answers. “Many educators made an assumption that students wouldn’t share online. And yet, all of us share online all the time,” she said. 

It also makes it easier for companies in the business of cheating to percolate within post-secondary groups, on social media, carefully crafting messages to appeal to those struggling with homework under the weight of the pandemic. 

“These companies are doing direct marketing outreach to students via Instagram, by a TikTok video, via Youtube,” she said, all the while using a rhetoric meant to comfort stressed out students…. 

✅Students Are Cheating More During the Pandemic 

(WSJ, Tawnell D. Hobbs, May 12, 2021)  

With many students at home, and with websites offering services to do their homework, schools have seen a surge in academic dishonesty 

...Students are uploading their test questions on specialized websites where experts answer them for a fee. One professor at North Carolina State University caught students cheating by offering a unique set of questions to each, some of which quickly showed up on a for-profit homework website that helped him to identify who posted them. In all, 200 students, one fourth of his class, was caught cheating. Texas A&M University had a 50% increase in cheating allegations in the fall from a year earlier.

 . . . 

…A new breed of site allows students to put up their own classwork for auction. 

Among the newer ways to cheat are homework auction sites, which give students a say in who does their work and at what price. Students post their assignment on a website, along with a deadline; the website acts as a marketplace for bidders who offer to do the assignment. The bidders, who often refer to themselves as tutors, can tout degrees and other credentials. Some companies allow students to rate their work and post reviews online. While educators can use software to check for plagiarism, such tools aren’t much help against services that produce original work…. 

✅Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School  

(NYT, Natasha Singer and Aaron Krolik, May 9, 2021) 

The university accused 17 students of cheating on remote exams, raising questions about data mining and sowing mistrust on campus. 

✅As pandemic continues, cheating gains 

(Yale Daily News, MADISON HAHAMY & KEVIN CHAN, April 4, 2021)  

The News conducted a survey of Yale undergraduates that showed approximately 50 percent of those who committed academic dishonesty did so for the first time during the virtual learning semesters. 

At the end of the fall 2020 semester, Timothy Newhouse, associate professor of chemistry and instructor for “Organic Chemistry for First Years I,” sent an email to his students. 

“Amazing job on the final!!! I just finished going through these and I am so pleased and excited,” Newhouse wrote, though he declined to comment for this article. “You did exceptionally well as a class and maybe were the best class year that I’ve seen.” 

But according to one student in Newhouse’s class, the exceptional grades were not the result of an extraordinarily intelligent or hard-working class, but due to acts of academic dishonesty committed by students — acts made much easier by the online format of the course. 

“It’s because you can literally from an iPad, switch over to Google and Google the exact problem … find the answer, write it down, and they wouldn’t be able to tell,” the student said. All of the students who spoke to the News, whether they committed academic dishonesty or not, did so under the condition of anonymity. Newhouse’s class was not the only one where cheating occurred. 

Last month, the News conducted a survey on academic dishonesty at Yale, which was completed by 336 Yale undergraduates. Of that number, 96 students, or 28.57 percent of respondents, reported committing academic dishonesty during their time at Yale. Around half of those 96 students said they committed their first act of academic dishonesty during remote learning. The survey follows a similar one conducted by the News in February 2019, which found that 14 percent of the 1,400 respondents committed academic dishonesty. 

. . . 

Alongside an increase in cheating during the pandemic, the News’ survey also found that 52.58 percent of those who committed academic dishonesty did so in a science course, and 50.52 percent did so in a quantitative reasoning course. Only 19.59 percent committed academic dishonesty in a humanities and arts course.

 . . . 

The anonymous student in Newhouse’s class had never cheated before the pandemic began. But he found the classroom circumstances “so impossibly difficult” that “[he] felt like it was very ethical to cheat.” 

“I always feel like I’ve never unethically cheated because I’ve always tried to honor the spirit of the rule and make sure that I’m learning,” he said…. 

✅How Cheating in College Hurts Students

(US News, Josh Moody, March 31, 2021) . .

Academic dishonesty may undercut career preparation and lead to disciplinary measures, including expulsion in severe cases.

…Cheating is a multibillion-dollar business, with some educational technology companies making money off students who use their products to break or bend academic integrity rules and others earning revenue from colleges trying to prevent academic dishonesty.

Jarrod Morgan, founder and chief strategy officer of ProctorU, an online test proctoring service that observes students taking tests for colleges and other educational organizations, says the number of students engaging in academic dishonesty during the coronavirus pandemic is soaring.

By some estimates, Morgan says, cheating on proctored college exams is up by as much as 700% for some subsets of students.

"I have to stress that we catch people cheating every single day," Morgan says. .The challenges of remote instruction – which many colleges have switched to temporarily because of COVID-19 – have led to an increase in student anxiety, experts say, which in turn has prompted many to cheat when taking exams in online classes.

"One of the predominant reasons for cheating is stress," says Camilla J. Roberts, president of the International Center for Academic Integrity. "Students are stressed to perform; they're stressed to maintain a grade. They feel like cheating is their only option."

While the numbers of cheaters are reportedly spiking, most instructors underestimate just how rampant the issue is, says Eric Anderman, a professor at Ohio State University—Columbus who studies academic integrity. "We think we're underestimating it because people don't want to admit to it."….

✅How college students learned new ways to cheat during pandemic remote schooling 

(CNBC, Samantha Subin, March 21, 2021) 

Flying drones, sticky notes on dogs, and virtual group chats. 

Amid the pandemic shift to remote school, age-old copying is out, and these are some of the tricks students are using to cheat their way to “As” at colleges across the globe. The rise in cheating is forcing colleges and universities to adapt to the unintended consequence of students living and learning from the comfort of their homes. 

A recent study led by Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at the Imperial College London, found that the number of questions and answers posted on Chegg’s homework help section for five STEM subjects between April and August 2020 was up over 196% from the same time period in 2019. The study ruled that the increase correlated with the shift to online school and indicates students are using the tool in ways “not considered permissible by universities.” 

While websites like Chegg and Course Hero aren’t designed for cheating — they’re marketed as a place for students to get help — they do offer a platform for it, experts say. 

Texas A&M reportedly found more than 800 cases of academic fraud after a faculty member noticed students were finishing complex exams in less than a minute, with some of the information coming from Chegg, a university official told the NBC News Stay Tuned Snapchat channel. Boston University also reportedly investigated students inappropriately using the site, among other resources, to cheat, several news sites reported. A spokesperson from BU confirmed in an email that they investigated a misconduct case last spring. 

 . . . 

Occasionally professors take action or acknowledge the cheating. In one of Simeon Charles’ courses, a professor openly acknowledged that many students used similar wording on a short answer question. Given the sheer number of students involved, he was reluctant to take action. Many students like Charles readily use Chegg to source answers. On the off chance the website is wrong, they notify the class through group chats and messaging apps. 

“So, I do feel morally conflicted,” Charles, a Canada-based student told Stay Tuned. “However, I am at the point where I’m like, if I’m paying you thousands of dollars for an education and you’re not doing your job, then I don’t have to do mine either.” 

. . . 

Many professors recycle exams semester to semester, offering a lucrative business opportunity for some teaching assistants and students to sell answer keys for a price. This is not a new phenomenon but an issue further exacerbated by remote learning. One student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, encountered another student during a summer course in 2020 offering to help with exams over the phone. While the student declined the offer, they said in an interview they were “closer to cheating than they normally would be.” 

. . . 

Students who cheat are worried about the effects of their actions, including how they will connect the dots when future classes build on unlearned material. But they stand by their choices. 

″In my honest opinion, I do not think cheating is bad,” Charles said. “I think if you’re provided the opportunity to cheat, go for it. The only, the only time it is wrong is if you get caught.” 

✅A Spike in Cheating Since the Move to Remote? 

(Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden, February 5, 2021)  

New research finds jump in number of questions submitted to "homework help" website Chegg after start of pandemic, an increase the authors say is very likely linked to rise in cheating. 

The number of questions asked and answered on the “homework help” website Chegg has skyrocketed since classes migrated online due to the pandemic, an increase that authors of a new study published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity link to a likely increase in cheating. 

Chegg, which has an honor code prohibiting cheating and which promotes itself as a site where students can get help on their homework, allows users to post a question to the site and receive an answer from a Chegg-identified expert “in as little as 30 minutes.” (The site’s posted average response time is 46 minutes.) The authors of the new study found that the number of questions posted on the site in five different science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines increased by 196.25 percent in April to August of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. 

“Given the number of exam style questions, it appears highly likely that students are using this site as an easy way to breach academic integrity by obtaining outside help,” the authors write in the article titled “Contract cheating by STEM students through a file sharing website: a COVID-19 pandemic perspective.” 

“From my experience as somebody who has set exams, marked exams, read exams, seen too many exams, these things look like exam questions,” said Thomas Lancaster, the lead author of the study and senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London, where he researches issues related to academic integrity and contract cheating. “From the point of view of Chegg, they are not promoting themselves as a service designed to help students to cheat, but they do offer a facility where you can get your answers completed quickly by a tutor, and the answers are delivered within the short time frame which matches an exam.” 

“At the same time, these questions have started to increase in volume with the timing being exactly alongside the move to online teaching, the move to online exams and assessments, often in a completely unsupervised environment,” Lancaster continued. “It would seem to be quite a heavy coincidence if this was just purely a lot more students wanting to get assistance for unassessed work. I does seem to me like there are people using Chegg to cheat.”

Off limits to the public

U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either  (NYT)

A new report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. 

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report. 

     The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said. That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret…. 

. . . 

     The final report will also include a classified annex, the officials said. While the annex will not contain any evidence concluding that the phenomena are alien spacecraft, the officials acknowledged that the fact that it would remain off limits to the public was likely to continue to fuel speculation that the government had secret data about alien visitations to Earth….

Many CSU students see big upsides to online learning. Now, there is a push to expand it 

(LA Times) 

     In early December, California State University leaders made a bold announcement: All 23 campuses would reopen for in-person classes in fall 2021. But with registration underway for the new academic year, the return is looking anything but normal — and it has become clear the pandemic has altered the future of the nation’s largest four-year university system. 

     Online options are here to stay. .Throughout the system, in spring surveys, campus discussions and early registration trends, a new realization has emerged among students and staff. At CSU’s largely commuter campuses, many found valuable upsides to virtual learning: greater flexibility in their college-work-life balance, fewer expenses, the power to keep students in college. 

     “What we learned during the pandemic is that virtual learning provides the opportunity for students to get an education while they’re trying to balance a number of different things in their lives, whether they’re parents or taking care of an elderly parent or working or living in a rural area,” CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro said this week. “What I believe, based on what I’ve heard from students and faculty and staff throughout the CSU, is that we will have more virtual offerings after the pandemic is over than we did before the pandemic.” 

     The changing environment at CSU reflects post-pandemic higher education trends nationally in which students are demanding more online options. And many CSU students bring distinct California challenges to their education, grappling with high housing costs and traffic-clogged commutes to campus while juggling multiple jobs….