Cheating in the Internet Age

January, 2002

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A few months ago a teacher came to me with the following problem. One of her students was taking an examination and had a Blackberry wireless e-mail device that was being used to ask for help from a colleague located in the school library. The teacher was furious with the student and blamed technology for facilitating cheating. In fact, she was applauding the move by some schools to ban personal technologies from the classroom, especially those handheld devices that facilitated connection to the outside world.

In the months since this encounter I've heard similar stories from others, all of which were being told to facilitate the move to banning personal electronics from schools. This response, while understandable at some level, seems to fly in the face of the reality that broadband wireless networks are becoming commonplace both in school and out. I have an 802.11 card for my laptop (which also works with my pocket-sized iPaq) and am able to get onto the Internet from a variety of locations ranging from coffee houses to classrooms. From my perspective, the benefit of having anywhere/anytime access to the vast informational and collegial resources of the Net is unquestionably good. As a road warrior, ready access to the Web is essential for maintaining a sense of "place" in a changing geographical landscape. The hotel rooms may change, but the online Library of Congress and my e-mail are still in the same place.

In chatting with these incensed educators I added fuel to the fire by suggesting that their students were demonstrating important research skills. When confronted with a question they could not answer, they sought out a reliable source rather than guessing. This is called "research" and is a valued skill outside of school. Of course, I was intentionally missing their point, which was that they wanted to know what students had managed to remember in their own heads, as if this was the hallmark of an educated person today.

My suggestion was to look through the other end of the telescope: Instead of asking students to repeat what they had learned from books, questions about the content should be phrased to elicit highly personal responses from the student, responses that require that the student move beyond the information to thinking about its impact. In short, the Internet is not at fault. The problem comes from asking questions for which the Internet provides a ready answer.

Of course, responding to this challenge is not easy. Educators, textbook publishers and curriculum designers have spent years developing a catalog of things for students to learn, and have created questions designed to measure whether or not students have, in fact, learned the material that was covered. To now require that each teacher suddenly transform the nature of student inquiry during an examination is a large task. In the process of reframing questions in ways that elicit highly personal responses, the teacher may start to question some of the content being taught. What is a teacher to do when she finds information that only makes sense to impart if the student is to function as a talking parrot? Facts presented in isolation obscure the fabric of history and shut down any possibility of thinking in terms of whole systems. For example, we might teach students about the invention of the stirrup and its role in European warfare in the time of the knights in shining armor. This seemingly simple invention can, in that context, be seen as having had a tremendous impact on the battlefield, and perhaps on the outcomes of wars. But suppose the teacher asked a different question on an examination. For example, I visited a tomb in China that held a saddle from 400 BC. This saddle had stirrups as well, and predates the European incorporation of this technology by well over a thousand years. Based on this information, wouldn't it be interesting to ask why, with this tremendous technological lead, China did not extend its empire over the entire planet?

A question like this requires original thinking from the student, thinking that goes far beyond the information presented in the textbook, thinking that can not be done by reading still more information from web sites.

In short, each question we ask our students should be phrased with the idea that students could very well have their textbooks with them during the test. These "open-book" exams, more common to college than K-12, were among the most difficult exams of my life as a student. Once the teacher let me have the informational resources during an examination, I knew I was going to be asked to think deeply about something, and thinking is a lot harder than remembering.

But open-book exams are not a cure-all. Lately I've been hearing from teachers who have assigned book reports or essays and had students simply download pre-written materials from the Web and hand them in. As you can quickly establish for yourself, there are numerous Web sites filled with essays that can be downloaded for free, or for a modest fee. Need five pages on Catcher in the Rye? I found hundreds of them in less than a minute by searching on Yahoo! — and I'm not just talking about the so-called "cheat" sites designed to provide students with last-minute essays. For example, Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) has in-depth reports on many books on our students' reading list. While the essays on the cheat sites vary in quality, the enterprising student can usually select from several in fashioning a last-minute report. For example, screw-essays.com (http://www.screw-essays.com) has five relating to Catcher in the Rye, some almost worth grading.

So now the challenge has less to do with technology in the classroom, and everything to do with what students may do from the privacy of their own homes. Some educators choose to fight fire with fire, by requiring that every essay be run through a service such as Turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com) Systems like this compare a student's essay with a huge library of essays plus other web-based resources and then highlight the parts of the student's work that may be copied from other sources. Once the report is generated, the student essay is then added to the library to be used in future searches (without compensating the student for his/her authorship, by the way). The problem with this approach is that entire sentences are highly likely to find matches, even when the student work is original. After all, how many ways can we comment on Holden Caufield's fascination with a particular four letter word? Furthermore, it seems to me that computerized screening of papers might just make students craftier in their attempts to cheat.

There is another way to address this issue that I think might be more effective.

When giving an assignment (such as a book report, for example), let students know they have two options: Either write an original paper, or go to one of the myriad paper sites (hand out a list of web sites to the students) and have them download five existing book reports on the chosen book which they then grade. Tell students they need to justify their grading by making references to the work under review, and back up every comment they make with their own observations about the book. This task (which can be harder than writing an original review) helps develop thinking skills that will last a lifetime. Also, since the students know that you already are aware of the online paper sites, they are less likely to try to pass someone else's work off as their own.

Ban technology from the classroom? No, just ban questions for which technology provides instant answers.

Copyright, © 2002, Thornburg Center. All Rights Reserved.