Summer Reflections: Academic Dishonesty: Should you trust your students?

I'm a trusting person, until the trust is lost. As an instructor, I see a lot of the opposite, with colleagues that don't trust students until that trust is built. Should I be more skeptical and more wary?

All of the university classes I taught this past semester were virtual and synchronous, because of COVID-19. In one upper-division undergraduate course I taught, which is required for our majors, I tried to design the assessments to be cheat-resistant (which generally worked well, I think). However, it became clear by the end of the semester that some students did commit academic dishonesty, and that is the basis for this thread of posts.

Even though I spent more time than I care to admit dealing with administrative policies and in one-on-one conferences with suspected cheaters, I did learn a lot, and that's the reason I'm sharing lessons learned.

Ultimately, nine of the seventy students in my class provided me (inadvertently) with evidence of academic dishonesty. So, cheating is abundant, although I can't tell whether this is exacerbated by virtual instruction or not. The students definitely argue that it is, based on procrastination, inability to focus, and other factors (comments I'll also leverage later when I write about setting assignment deadlines…).

Will this influence my future teaching? Absolutely, but only in positive ways. As I'll explain in upcoming posts, I'll be even more thoughtful about designing cheat-resistant assessments, and I'll also spend more deliberate time discussing cheating with my classes. Much of what I will say might go right in one ear and out the other, but some of my interactions with cheaters this semester have been real eye-openers about student conception of what is reasonable and what is wrong, what they think constitutes cheating, and the forces that promote cheating.

Despite the unfortunate cheating events in this class over the past semester, am I less trusting now? Absolutely not. There may be the rare bad apples, but I won't let them spoil the bunch. And here's why.

At the beginning of the semester, one of my students posted in the Zoom chat window an invitation to join "GroupMe." Being unfamiliar, I asked what that was about, and a student responded that this is an app that lets anybody create an online forum that people can join and essentially conduct a large, ongoing group chat. In the prior semester (Fall 2020), I had also had a student in one of my classes initiate a GroupMe group for that class, but I hadn't paid any attention. Now that the same app had appeared again, I began to suspect that it is a common practice for students to generate a Group for each class, each semester, to conduct who knows what sort of behind-the-scenes communication, not involving the instructor. I was curious about what might go on in these sorts of open online forums, so I eventually decided to try to join.

The way GroupMe works is that the person that starts the Group provides a registration URL, which requires a name and email address to be provided to request to join the Group. Then the person that started the Group receives those requests and decides whether to admit each person. Although I'm not at all proud of this, I submitted a request under a different name, and not using my professional email address…and I was approved to join the Group. Let the subterfuge commence.

Except…not. The dialogue that ensued usually had to do with class, but not always. Sometimes posts were about current events in the world, or local social opportunities. The most frequent types of posts from students were of two types:

• Did I miss something / what are we doing next class / when is this assignment due / do we have class today?
• Can somebody point me to the chapter/lecture where we talked about topic _X_?

Basically, the most interesting thing I learned from my GroupMe experience is that students apparently prefer to ask each other about class details, instead of asking me (the knowledgable party) directly. Due dates, whether we have class today, whether I've already posted the lecture slides in advance of class…they all seem to be questions that I am best suited to answer, yet the students never asked me.

I must say, in conclusion, that I don't mind this - students often have opportunities (in person) to discuss such topics with each other, and to seek clarification. This is normal, and totally fine. However, it has given me pause about how I can help make these topics even more clear.

Should I try to join GroupMe groups as the real me, so students can ask via chat? Probably not.

Should I create a policy that I'll be active in my learning management system (LMS) website and that I'll respond to posts on our Q&A Forum as quickly as I can? Maybe.

The most important thing I discovered, however, is that nobody ever used GroupMe to cheat. I assumed I would observe rampant cheating using this online tool, but I never did. There are two probable reasons for this:

1. Most of the seventy students in the class joined the Group, and because they don't all know each other, they probably feel they can't trust each other. If one student tried to cheat, they risked a goody-two-shoes student alerting me about it. And, I think that would actually happen: I had two students in my class contact me individually to alert me about other types of cheating they had noticed over the semester. Thus, given a large enough class, I would think it likely that any group-based discussion would be relatively safe from cheating.
2. There are other, safer ways to cheat. There's no need to cheat publicly using GroupMe when small groups of students that do know each other from prior classes (or for other reasons) can get together offline, or using another app, to cheat. This is the more traditional form of cheating in online/asynchronous classes, I think, and I definitely found evidence of this during the semester as well.

In sum, I've returned to square one. I do trust my students to be academically honest, and I won't be worried about students electing to use methods I don't establish and control to converse with other students. However, I'll still be as wary about cheating, because it does still happen, and perhaps more easily for online classes and especially on asynchronous, untimed and open-resource exams. And that's where I'm heading in the next post, when I'll begin to discuss how I have designed and will redesign classes and assessments to be more cheat-resistant.