We all know that it happens. No matter what measures we have in place, not matter how hard we look – every teacher knows that at some point some student has cheated in their class and gotten away with it.
Cheating has become quite prevalent and normalized in many of our academic cultures. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year, I curated several articles about cheating to prompt some discussion during the first week of school. Two interesting ideas emerged from my discussion with students: 1) Students felt justified in cheating in classes where they did not feel the content would be relevant to their lives after high school. 2) Students felt that learning the skills needed to cheat were more valuable than much of what they were being taught in school.
And now with the advent of more online teaching in the fall of 2020, this conversation has emerged among teachers as well. We know that students are constantly Face timing and texting with friends during online school. We know the temptation to cheat is present for the modern student, and, based on the feedback from my students last year, one many students don’t deem worth overcoming.
As a classroom teacher, my question was “How hard am I willing to work to make sure that kids don’t cheat?” I could make different tests and distribute different copies to students. I could be constantly circulating and watching every move. I could confiscate every phone at the beginning of class. But I knew that no matter how much work I did, if a student wanted/ needed to cheat, then they would find a way to do it, in spite of all my effort.
There are reasonable and relatively easy things we as teachers can do in an electronic age to discourage cheating, especially when using electronic tools: shuffle the order of the questions or answers, monitor screens with online software like DyKnow, use applications that allow locking down browsers, use platforms like TurnItIn.com to detect plagiarism. But we all know that none of those prevents it completely.
Personally, I like to address cheating in two ways: 1) eliminating the need to cheat and 2) teaching them explicitly about cheating. In this blog, I want to talk about the first one by asking the question what can educators do to reduce the need to cheat?
- Address the culture of the school. I’ve found that cheating typically correlates with the overall culture of the school. In a school with a “win at all costs” mentality, where the A or the high GPA is the only goal, even highly capable students will cheat in order to ensure success. However, in a school culture that focuses on growth, not perfection, and students are allowed to re-do work in order to demonstrate mastery, the need to cheat diminishes. If you reduce the pressure to succeed at all costs, you can reduce the need to cheat. One of the benefits of mastery-based grading or standards-based grading is that students can make another attempt if they don’t mast it the first time.
- Slow down the pace or allow students to self-pace. Students cheat when they don’t understand the material. They haven’t learned it at the same pace as everyone else in the class, and the class is moving on. Sometimes rather than face severe late penalties, they take a faster route like purchasing an essay off the internet or getting the answers from a friend. As teachers, we often assume that students simply lack the motivation to do the work. This can keep us from adding support to those who truly need it. We combat this through smaller mastery checks and formative assessments to identify who doesn’t know the material, and then we need to provide the support they need. Sometimes that’s small group work in class, sometimes it’s a one-on-one conversation, sometimes it’s additional tutoring outside of school. The Modern classrooms Project is one of the best structures I’ve seen for allowing students to self-pace.
- Make the material worth learning. Sometimes student cheat because they don’t think the material is worth learning. They fail to see the connection between the classwork and the real world. In many course curricula, this connection can be hard to find – even for the teachers. When I design my units, I want to make sure that my final assessment creates a “need to know” for students by solving a real-world problem or creating a real-world project. Are the students in your class simply mastering information to take a test or is the information something they need to use to solve a real-world problem? The more connections I can make for them, the more the will see the value of the work.
- Do more project-based assessments. When students have to do something with the information they have been learning, it will become clear who does and who doesn’t know the material. A colleague who taught online college classes for years echoed this sentiment, and many colleges are moving to this kind of assessment for this reason. Make sure your assessments ask students to use the information to solve a problem. If you want to know more about PBL or find high quality projects, check out PBLWorks.org.
- Be approachable. Just because you offer additional support, it doesn’t mean that the students who need it will take advantage of it. We also have to be approachable and inviting so that students feel like they can ask for what they need. If a student legitimately needs an extension on a deadline, they should be able to ask for it. No matter what your overall school culture is, you can create a culture of safety within your classroom. Create a culture where students ask questions when they don’t understand, where students can ask for help, where students can ask for what they need without being ashamed or embarrassed.
These are some of the things I have done to eliminate the need for students to cheat in my classroom…although I”m pretty sure you could find some who have. Again, completely eliminating cheating doesn’t seem like a reasonable goal for me. But I can do things to eliminate the need to cheat.
What are some things you have done to eliminate the need to cheat in your classroom?
ITeachStuffBlog 
One thought on “Make Cheating Obsolete”