Cheating

Hello everyone,

The question of how to deal with cheating has come up.

This is a little sensitive because cheating is endemic but not universal. In other words, most students cheat at some time (according to both statistics and my experience), but not all students cheat. Further, not all students who cheat do it all the time. This means that you have to be very careful to make sure that students can't and don't cheat, but you must also be careful not to make false accusations of cheating. This doesn't even touch the problem of what you should do when you catch one of your best students cheating, or when political and social pressure favor overlooking the cheating (such as in the case of a top scholar or athlete).

Some of you may have cheated yourselves at one time or another (I did). You may feel that you have no right to judge someone for doing the same thing you have done. This is understandable but wrong. If a man falls off a cliff and survives, he still has the right to warn others to stay away from the edge of the cliff.

If you do not believe that cheating is bad, or if you do not believe that cheaters should not suffer serious consequences for their actions, then you will only contribute to the problem. There is no need to get caught up in a lengthy argument with cheaters who believe that their actions are inconsequential ("I just copied a couple of things; what's the big deal?"). Cheating is bad; cheating should be eradicated if possible; there should be no argument. Egregious cheating can result in suspension or failure (on the collegiate level expulsion and cancellation of a degree are the most serious consequences; in the real world, jail).

Of course, you can't set yourself up as the cheat police. You could literally spend your entire life trying to deal with all the possible cheating, and you just don't have time. Let me tell you a few tricks of the trade that I have used to quell the cheating in my classes.

1. At the beginning of the school year and regularly throughout the school year, I had students write in class under my supervision. I learned their diction and language abilities. When they handed in something that was obviously not in their diction or far beyond their language abilities, I would simply tell them they didn't get credit for things that were not in their own words, and they must cite all ideas or language that wasn't their own. I rarely made accusations of cheating; they were allowed to rewrite.

When they challenged me on it ("It's all mine!"), I would extract a phrase and ask them to explain it, at which point they would usually say that their brother or sister has helped them, and I would simply revert back to the criteria: It must be in their own words, or the source must be cited.

Occasionally, students would give something they have simply downloaded. If they can download it, I can google it. Don't allow this.

2. You must assume that all homework will be copied. There is no way around this. A few of them will be honest (who would the rest copy off?), but a large percentage will copy. If your homework is worth a lot, this is more likely. Set up your homework assignments so that it doesn't matter if they copy or not, but it DOES matter if they understand the material. (For example, give them homework; tell them they must understand it, then quiz them on it.) Never use homework as an assessment; it's not accurate because of the likelihood that copying has occurred. (In English, when the homework is an original essay, you must take a different tack. You just have to use other methods to make sure that no copying occurs, but those aren't as hard as they would be in, say, math.)

3. Be very strict with tests. If they copy on even one question, I would give them a zero on the entire test. (I have made exceptions for the foolish kids who copied off other foolish kids, and neither had any idea what they were doing. It was not worth my effort to give them both zeros, when they had less than 10% anyway. This was not a matter of letting them off scot free; they often felt worse for copying from someone that didn't know the answer either.) The problem here is being certain that someone is copying; it is rarely obvious. I learned to delay accusations until after the class. I would announce, "I reserve the right to give zeros to all of you who are talking; I also reserve the right to give you a zero without telling you that I have done it." After the announcement, someone might ask, "Did I get a zero?" I would say, "If you were talking at all, you should expect a zero." I would not really give the zeros unless I was absolutely confident that I had caught someone talking. The announcement made them circumspect, however.

It's useful to stand at the back of the classroom during tests. Students who want to cheat will usually look around to see if you are watching them, and they're easy to discourage that way. (As soon as they move, you will look at them, and they will see that you are watching and they will usually avoid cheating.)

If I was reasonably sure that someone had cheated, but not absolutely sure, I would write "See me" instead of a grade on the test. Talking to the student(s) later, I would be honest about the evidence for apparent cheating and would ask for an explanation. (Such evidence might be something like two students got a question wrong in exactly the same words, or one student has a correct answer in exactly the same words as another student, but missing part of the answer.) Once they confessed, I would explain that they would receive a zero on this test, and they must avoid anything that looked like cheating in the future.

Please do not take cheating lightly. Please do not let cheaters get good grades in your classes. Please do not allow plagiarism. Just because it's common, it doesn't mean that it should be acceptable.

Jeff Combe