The next part is what is genius about this process- he would call the entire group into his office and provide them with blank sheets of paper to show their work (which he kept in his posession after the test). He would then ask each member of the group one of 4 or 5 questions he prepared about the core concepts they were being tested on. The grade the individual received was dependent on the entire effort of the group. No student wants their classmate upset with them for not doing their part so every student made sure they were prepared for ALL the concepts they would be tested on.

If the group had not “mastered” the concept, they did not pass the test and would not pass the test until the could effectively show they had learned the concept being taught and apply in a practical matter. Students are given 3 lab sessions to pass master the concept. At re-test the students are only tested on the concepts they haven’t “mastered”. Of course, each time they re-test the concept is the same but the question is different. He wanted to see if they understood the thought process behind the question and if they could correctly apply the equations used to arrive at the correct answer. If they do not pass within this timeframe they receive a “0″ for that test.

Granted, this was a high school teacher, so he had lab 5 days a week. It would be difficult for a college instructor/professor to do with lab being held only once or twice a week. But the results were amazing; more times than not, groups mastered the concept within the first testing session. Very rarely did a group require all three sessions.

Some student use an updated version of Morse Code. They’ll tap on their desk the question number under the guise of nervousness. A co-conspirator will return the answer. This usually works best with multiple-choice quizzes.

I think the US university system needs to get rid of all the adjunct faculty who can’t create their own exams..

I used to work in an industry that dealt with a lot of cash, but paid the bulk of its employees minimum wage, thus theft was always a concern. The Home Office sent a security team to teach the company’s managers how to limit/eliminate the problem. One thing they said has always stuck with me.

“20% of your people will always steal. They will justify it, (the boss is an idiot, the job pays too low, etc.). 20% of your people will never steal. If fact, they will resent being put into situations where they could be liable for someone else’s thievery. The remaining 60% are affected by management. If management maintains an honest system then stealing will be minimal.”

Works the same with cheating on tests. Be active in the classroom—don’t sit at your desk grading papers while the students test.

I’d run the exercise for practice on the next the the last day of classes and for real on the last day of class. In the for real exercise, the last student standing got $20. Nobody else got anything except by the end of it they’d all finally caught on to how to interpret the stats that indicate statistical significance. (This is something that many many graduate students have to look up in order to remember.)

The exam that followed the next week was entirely “open.” They had networked computers in front of them, notes, cell phones, everything. And they could also consult each other. They were to access an SPSS database, select several variables, and run a correlation or regression analysis. In the meantime, they used powerpoint to draw up a path diagram to illustrate the cause and effect relationship between their variables as stated in an appropriate research question with accompanying formal statements of their research hypothesis. And all along they shift everything into a composite Word document that gives a mini-research report, where they report finding and — draw conclusions about the statistical significance of their results. Each student picked their own variables and turned in their own report, one copy printed out, one copy posted electronically.

They had two and a half hours.

We all knew that the specifics of the computer skills they needed would change in the coming years, but the amazing thing, to me (I’m sixty-three and formally retired now), is that all my students always managed to develop their research questions and analyses on the fly, complete their reports, and post their work in the time alloted. What was happening? Their comfort with the technology allowed them to overcome serious math phobias. They caught on to the thrill of the chase, and it usually came together in that final contest on the last day of class, when they saw that stats boils ALL those numbers down into just the two you need to make a decision with. And the only decision you have to make is so easy: which number is bigger?

Some students have said, “But my other teachers don’t do this.” My answer has been, “Evidently your other teachers don’t realize what students can do with cell phones!” I’ve had high-pitched ringtones demonstrated for me by young folks who can hear them, where people around 35 or older can’t. (sort of like a dog whistle, in principle) Perfect for surreptitious text messaging. I’ve also seen a student type the lecture notes for an entire period into his phone, when he forgot to bring pen and notebook one day. He easily could have called that information right back up during a test , and whatever else he might have chosen to type into that phone. But if the phone’s sitting up front for the duration of the test, none of this is possible.

I also put a disclaimer in the syllabus disavowing any liability for damage to students’ cell phones during tests. If a student wants to make sure nothing happens to his/her phone during one of my tests, then he/she can simply leave it at home.

Let the students be and you will be surprised. Have like 100 questions in 60 minutes…or something like that so that the open book can’t be done cold. You must have studied to know which pages to flip to fast. I especially liked these ones…super speedy testing. First answer in your head is usually correct, but you can flip a page to confirm. It’s a nice rush and a good feeling after the test is over…not a stress bomb until you get the results.

If open book isn’t your way, then may i suggest standing all the students in the front of the class with their hands on buzzers and an audience to cheer. Only way to avoid cheating that i see.

Good luck all you hard core teachers. Who cares if i cheat. Don’t stress…Just kick me out for academic dishonesty….i deserve it! But then again i am paying your salary…so maybe just put me on probation…hehehe.

I’ve been a tenured college teacher for 26 years, so I think I’ve seen and been part of virtually every attempt to cheat known to students. I was also a student myself for 9 years of college, so I’ve seen that side, too.

Here’s my conclusion: students will be tempted to cheat if the environment that’s set up by the teacher makes for an unrealistically difficult challenge. So, I write all my exams and assign all my papers so that students feel excited and empowered to explore the subject and do the best that they can, without crushing stress and anxiety. How? ALL my tests are open book, open note, and I encourage all students to bring a cheat sheet to class. In fact, if students want to, they can submit their cheat sheet along with their test, and I’ll grade the cheat sheet for up to 3 Bonus Points on the test. Working hard to put together an effective cheat sheet is an excellent way to learn the material. It requires the ability to discriminate between the core concepts and the unnecessary, and using critical thinking skills for organization. I also encourage every student to re-do every test grade. No grade is set in my grade book until the student tells me that they are done working on it. I will even help student re-do a test, in my office, as a tutor. They still have to write the new answers and EXPLAIN each one in their own words, but if they can to that, they’ve learned the material. As for papers, I make sure that the topic I assign must be written about in such a very specific way that it is impossible to buy one or copy it on-line. I give students a basic heuristic that they must follow for each paper, which is unique to that subject/topic, and will not be found in any paper mill on-line.
Cheating hasn’t been an issue in any of my classes in many years; students really enjoy my testing process; they say that they learned more in my classes than any others they’ve ever taken, and actually liked being in class.

Personally, I don’t care about the cheaters. Not at all. They aren’t cheating me, but are cheating themselves. To me it’s worse to treat eveyone as a cheater than to let the cheaters cheat themselves out of an education. Besides, there are always CEO positions for the cheaters, and they may even be elected president one day. Sigh…

From my POV, the reason we give/take tests is the same reason we refrain from cheating on those tests. There are many times in personal and professional life when I have to rely on my own resources, on what I know myself and what I can wrestle out of my memory. What my students hear me say is this: “If there were any way we could get you all to study, without giving you the tests, we’d just let you study and we’d never test. Studying for the test is what is it all about. That’s where you learn. The test is only important because we don’t know any other way to push students beyond their comfort and joyful zones. And that’s what it takes to learn.”

In the mid-90s I had back to grad school in order to get my own social research degree so I could figure out how to read for myself the research literature responsiple for so many nutty ideas being passed along as education gospel. Keep in mind those were the days where a PhD student in the social sciences could actually hire a statistician to manage the quantitative portion of dissertation research. This was not considered cheating.

Computer applications hadn’t quite shifted from the mainframe to the PC get, although they made the leap during my time back in school. But since that nitty-gritty research was the part I’d come back to school to learn, I didn’t skip any steps during all the preliminary work that goes into a finished research project. So what was my reward?

After I had submitted the second draft of my finall resport, my dissertation committee decided I needed to change my model. That meant that I needed to add a variable here and take out a variable there. That meant setting up the statistical run again and then running it again. It was the proverbial “Do it over!” But because I had done every step myself, and because I had kept great notes for myself on what it was that I had done, I could reset and rerun the model in about six days. Today you could do it with just a few key strokes, in those days we weren’t using computer punch cards, but we were using a strange mix of PCs networked to the mainframe and still had to walk three blocks to pick up printouts from the night runs the mainframe made for lowly grad students.

To set up my model in the first place had taken steady work with a variety of people who had the skills to know what I needed to do and to teach me how to do it — but I did all the “work:” the keyboard pounding, the decision making, and the record keeping. That had taken the better part of three semesters. The six days on the second run was because all that how-to knowledge was now mine. That’s where my determination to know it all myself paid unexpected dividents.

I don’t bother my students with my grad school tale. But I do tell them about the night I spent with my sister in law on Memorial Day weekend at Vanderbilt Hospital in Memphis TN. She is a micro-biologist and I had just finished up a post-doc in gerontology at UA Birmingham, where a huge component of human physiology is involved in the course work. My wonderful teachers had leaped at the chance to use me as a control (a comparison) in their testing efforts since I was old enough to be the grandmother of my “traditional” classmates. Our assumptions were that there was nothing wrong with my motivation or my study skills, and that my testing skills and anxieties were within normal range, so if I couldn’t keep up with the younger crew on those tests, the limitations had to be in my own mental capapcity to pack the knowledge into my brain. The tests were designed to sort out the high end as well as the low end of the class. My scores were always within the A-, B+ range, the shining young stars always beat me out. None of us were cheating because we were all so measurment crazy: real numbers meant more to us than padded numbers. (Any yes, several of the also rans believed we were all nuts.)

But all that wasn’t my reward. It was that night I spent in the Memphis hosipital with my sister-in-law. I was asleep on the cot in her room when she woke up about 3:30 in the morning. She’d had a bout with cancer and was back in the hospital due to a blood clot in her lung. Right then she wanted to review everything we knew about what was going on in her body at the cellular level. So we reviewed the details of circulatory system, immune system, nervous and endocrin system all at the same time, as each pertained to her case. In the dark. Without notes.

That was a real test. But that was the test my academic tests had prepared me for, and I passed it. I had the knowledge to enter a technical discussion with a micro-biologist in a tight place and, in converstion with my eyes shut, “check her work,” i.e. give and take in question and answer until she had gained the reassurance that she still knew what she thought she did. (And I was stunned at my own capacity to remember the crucial stuff, under pressure). That’s why we do test, to check what we know. That’s why real student continue to really learn.

My sister-in-law faced her doctors (and the decisions she need to make) with confidence the next day and I am happy to report she has been living happily ever after, ever since.

Fran

Speak for yourself!

I tell the students how to study for these exams, and I “tweak” the questions from the test banks. With the advent of texting, one of the first things I noticed in my face-to-face classes is that students can’t text fast enough to cheat. They may get a few questions answered by texting, but they will fall behind on time and NOT get finished. So they get those unanswered questions wrong and end up failing the exam.

In addition, out of 750 points total for the course, only 150 points are assigned to exams which lessens the pressure for students who do not test well. I use unique in-class activities and exercises and presentations to make up the rest of the points of each course.

The homework tests for credit are open book, done in groups, consulting a tutor, whatever. The purpose here is to promote learning. Students on my campus do not spend enough time and effort studying outside of classes. The only rule is not to mark an answer until the student knows why it is the best answer.

Class tests on the same material (mostly not the same questions) a week later are closed book, as traditionally. Here the purpose is to measure, for credit, what the students know. Class tests are done like a controlled experiment: rule out all soucres of information except what a student recalls or can think through cognitively. No electronic devices or ear phones of any kind allowed. No use of a restroom w/o a proctor. Mine are large, crowded lecture rooms. We know cheating in such classes is mainly visual (excluding electroninc devices), and using 2 versions in alternate seating does not work. Actual experiments show many students can read answer spots at least 2 seats away in all directions. I have solved this by designing a simple, stiff, black cover sheet, which must be kept over the scantron answer sheet until the test is handed in for grading. A slot allows one answer to be written in at a time, while all the other 49 are kept under cover. Each answer on the class test is worth 2 points, compared to 1 point for each on the homework tests, which weighs the credit in favor of what they really know. This method works well.

For instance, a student who cheats on the homework test by merely copying others work is easy to spot; their score will be no more than 10+or-2/50 on the class test (5 choices per question), compared to 48/50, say, on the homework test. Memorizing imporant facts is required, but students know there will be less than half of the test that can be answered from memory alone. Most of the questions will require cognative processing of one sort or another, after any needed facts are recalled.

The means on the class tests usually run 5-20% below the homework, depending mainly on the percentage of underclassmen in the class each semester. If material for a block is more difficult than most, both tests’ means go down.

Final grade is also based on term papers and voluntary extra credit projects. A recent one I recall was this question given in class: How many miles of DNA is there in an average hman adult, given it is in the most common form with 3.4 Anstroms per nucleiotide pair? How does this compare with the radii of the planetary orbits in our solar system? The first 5 students to hand in an acceptable answer, with their work in writing, and citing any source consulted, earn 1 or 2 points extra credit.

One of the best responses I have seen to cheating on multiple choice tests was a professor who put all the questions and their answers into a computer program which then shuffled the order of the questions into 25 totally different tests. He wouldn’t tell anyone what was going on for the first test, and if he saw any “exacts”, he would take those students aside and warn them not to cheat without telling them that the tests were fixed. Some students got suspicious and stopped. Others didn’t and were taken out of the class (I assume on disciplinary action)

“Paul – “It has never been more true that education is the one thing we are willing to pay for but not receive.” Do you pay for your job education?”

I have no idea what you mean by this, or why you seemed to assume that I thought that education is just a matter of doing well on multiple choice tests (which, as you’ll note, I didn’t even mention). I’ve never given a multiple choice test in my 22 years of college teaching, though at the same time I’m well aware that it is very possible to write good multiple choice questions that require application of knowledge.

That doesn’t change the fact that the purpose of cheating is to get a grade (or pass a course) without having to learn the subject matter. That was my point.

The fact is, where there’s a will, there’s a way. I don’t necessarily think that cheating has increased in the past 20 years, but has just become much more efficient. Before, someone could maybe remind him or herself of a concept or two by writing on the back of a hand. Now, people have entire textbooks copied into phones.

You must cheat and assume everyone else cheats as well. I never had to cheat. I was prepared for my tests and never crammed. I turned in the cheaters. Cheaters are morally lacking and I don’t want them graduating and getting a degree. I don’t want a doctor who cheated his way through medical school to be my doctor. I don’t want unethical business men running our economy to the ground. I don’t want scientists who will falsify data to get ahead. Etc…

To Liina Ladon, who said “A recent survey conducted by a new station in my city indicated that 60% of the high school students surveyed admitted to cheating on their math and science exams.”

If the tests are done properly, especially with more advanced mathematical equations, you can easily catch the cheaters. Most students never graded papers so don’t realize that there are many ways to arrive at a solution to complex equations. Different people will work through complex problems in different order and put down different variable names. It’s much easier than you think to isolate a cheater in physics and math if you don’t use multiple choice tests. People who copy other peoples homework will also show up obviously to the graders.

Multiple guess tests are created by lazy instructors. I’ve always hated those tests. They don’t really test knowledge because the answer is presented and you narrow down the choices by discarding the obviously wrong ones and make a quick guess.

The best instructors tend to give open book tests and tell you that you can create one or even two pages of handwritten notes. When you create those “cheat sheets” you tend to learn the information. During those tests, I rarely had to open the book or look at the notes to answer any of the test questions.