It’s that time of year, writing course syllabi and deciding on the policies that we’ll be living with for the next 15 weeks! One component that always causes me to stop and think is the “Academic Integrity” section of my syllabus. Cheating is more common than ever – and easier to get away with too!
Empathy over Rigor
I’ve been watching the “anti-cheating arms race” for years now. When I was a student, faculty frequently used multiple-choice exams. They’d make 4 versions: the same questions in a different order with the same answers (also in a different order). I wonder if anyone ever studied the effect of “shuffling” problems on an assessment. For example, if one students’ version starts with an “easy” question and another version starts with a “hard” question, does it affect their mental state and performance?
With the advent of services like Chegg, students not only gain access to homework solutions and past exams (also with solutions) – they can snap a picture of a problem and get a step-by-step solution delivered in minutes! Yes, this is done during exams.
The bottom line is that as long as faculty use threats and punishments to prevent cheating, students will continue to find ways around them. Perhaps instead we should be asking WHY students feel the temptation to cheat, and start focusing on treating the root cause.
Why do students cheat?
To earn higher grades than they believe they can using an honest approach. Why would they do this? One word: inflation. The average grade in every course and every school has increased every year. The internet has given employers a much larger pool of candidates to select from (I read a study that showed how a name-brand organization can expect a minimum of 10,000 applications to entry-level jobs requiring college bachelors degrees). No one can review 10,000 applications by hand, so they filter by GPA first.
Students get kicked out of school, lose scholarships, land jobs with lower pay rates, and end up unemployed because we put more pressure than ever on an arbitrary score. As we continue to make schools more inclusive, we end up with a wider range of students in terms of their level of preparedness. Rather than responding by meeting our students where they are, we often set an unattainable threshold of performance and wish them luck. Never mind that many students are in a position of needing to care for family members, work part- or even full-time jobs, and manage other “life” requirements that the privileged students of 30 years ago never had to consider. Yet these privileged students from the past are the ones teaching our students in the present.
I’m sure there’s even more to it than this, but this is an area I am currently learning about.
What I’m Trying
Here’s the “Academic Integrity” statement from my syllabus this semester. My goal is to address cheating in two ways:
- By helping students see that the course content is only part of what they should be getting out of my courses. They’re also developing the professional skills they need to be successful after graduation.
- By creating a system which is flexible enough to respond to learners’ varying needs. If all you offer to do is crush someone with extreme measures, of course they’ll continue to violate policy and get creative about hiding it. On the other hand, if we meet people with empathy and help them grow into the best versions of themselves… well, let’s just say that I believe in creating safe spaces. Students are still figuring themselves out, what if we decided to help?
The Syllabus:
“When you graduate, you’ll earn a piece of paper that says you’re good at some things. The question is, “does what the paper says reflect reality?” While the main focus of our course is on the technical content, you’re going to grow as a professional human in several ways too:
- Deadline policies are here to help you develop the productivity skills that professionals use every day to manage complicated workloads and competing demands.
- Assignments and resubmission policies are designed to encourage you to try a thing, get specific feedback on how you can improve, and then try again. This is what it looks like in the real world – a common professional saying is “everything is a draft,” and it is true! Have you ever seen a product that didn’t go through several iterations?
- Integrity is more important than performance or grades. I know there is a lot of pressure on you earn high to scores, I dealt with it too. However, the people who land jobs and manage to hang onto them are actually able to do the work. That’s what we’re teaching you to do here. Don’t hamstring your career by faking it.
The specific “rules of engagement” will be attached to each assignment. In general, if the goal of the assignment is to learn new ideas or skills then any resource should be available. On the other hand, if the intention of the assignment is to measure your ability, then your resources will be limited to those provided to everyone in our class community by your professor.
The university defines academic dishonesty as having access to resources that your classmates do not. Our world is rife with unfair advantage and systems that privilege some while oppressing others. Don’t be a part of that problem by cheating on your work in this course. It isn’t a victimless crime: inaccurate scores on your assessments could be one more thing stacked against your classmates who chose to behave with integrity.
If you find yourself in violation of the “rules of engagement” for a given assignment,
you have two options:
- Hide it and hope you don’t get caught. If caught, we’re required to get Student Affairs involved. If you don’t get caught, you’ll have to live with yourself knowing you may have contributed to the oppression of others.
- Report your process: if you do something different than the “rules of engagement” (on purpose or by accident), simply write down what you did and submit it with the work. Rather than being punished, you’ll be praised for having the integrity to take a scary step. Then we’ll work together to figure out why this happened and how we can use an alternate assignment to accomplish the intended purpose of the original.
Remember: empathy always wins, and integrity is more important than a number on a piece of paper.”
