you are correct! Simply never.
I think you must hold online students to the same academic integrity to which you hold face-to-face students. In order to maintain institutional integrity, online students should be held to the same standards. I think the possibility of cheating increases when the students, online or face-to-face, know or perceive that their work is not being monitored for integrity issues.
Kristin
Cheating is never acceptable. I emphasize the importance of not only knowing the material but also personal integrity. In the classes I teach, the person most damaged by lack of knowledge due to cheating is the patient - it could literally be life or death.
I love Turnitin. This is a great tool. If others are not familiar with this, please reseach it...it is worth your time.
I vehemently disagree that we should not be concerned about cheating. It fundamentally devalues the online educational enterprise and needs to be vigilantly monitored and consequenced.
Using such tools as Turnitin helps instructors achieve this goal and vigilant enforcement of rigorous academic honor codes will have a deterrent effect on students who may be tempted to cheat.
There will always be those who try to cheat but making these individuals jump through more hoops to cheat than to get help can also have a deterrent effect on this behavior.
In class it's far easier to curb cheating in an exam. One of the things I've seen implemented are computer-based exams that scramble the questions for each student so that the chance of two students, sitting next to each other, having the same question on screen at the same time are slim.
There was discussion, amongst the faculty at the institute I work at, about creating a separate computer account that the student would have to log into to take an exam. When they log into that particular account, the profile would restrict all applications except the exam app, as well as restrict the ability to connect any USB device.
Once again, this is in a classroom environment, and wouldn't be possible in an online format simply due to the instructor not being able to proctor the exam. So, even if you could restrict them remotely, they can still grab the book and open it.
I do enjoy the idea that Mark had mentioned about allowing for multiple retakes. It takes the pressure off the student and allows them to learn from their mistakes instead of cheating to get a high score. This is definitely something I'm going to bring to the table at my school.
I feel it should absolutely be a concern. This is actually an issue that I've been wondering about in an online environment. How do we curb cheating online?
I'm going to assume that my students online are simply going to use their books or google answers while taking exams. So, if that's the case, do I simply up the difficulty of the questions so that they have to really think about the answer? I don't mind the idea of open book exams at all, and I feel that the fact that they learned far outweighs the actual score.
So, if the exam questions were more scenario based, and they had to use a combination of the book, online research, and their abilities to answer the questions wouldn't that kind of equal out to a simpler exam that forced them to answer questions from memory?
Shelley -
I definitely disagree with this! I have had students in an online class who I thought were cheating. This is because they had online quizzes that they had to take every week, which they got 100% on, but they never participated in the forum posts. What I thought was happening is that the students hired someone to take the quizzes, but thought that if they had the person participate in the forum posts, that they might actually let it leak out that it wasn't actually the student who took the quizzes. I think cheating happens in the online environment and is something that is really real.
Thank you for mentioning "positive reinforcement"....love that!
Students should be motivated to abstain from cheating by providing positive reinforcement for honest participation. This can be accomplished by writing specific course related assignments which mandate original thought and evaluation.
Have you used TurnItIn before on research papers?
Good point Sara. If we keep the students involved, they will not cheat as much. I think we will always have some students who will cheat for the adventure of it.
I like the idea of signing a pledge....make them accountable for their actions.
There are some students who will cheat in the traditonal classroom and the same students are the ones likely to cheat in online courses. We should build in every safeguard we can to prevent cheating like giving different forms of tests, wording questions in different ways,and stressing academic honesty with our students. They should also be required to sign a pledge not to give or receive information on the exam.
I strongly encourage having students take final online exams under the supervison of a proctor who might be a faculty member in their area. They also could be required to come in to a designated testing center in their area and take a paper and pencil exam under supervision.
The negatives to this would be the costs and time involved.
I think instructors or online facilitators should worry less about students cheating and spend more time developing contextual learning activities that engage the students.
I take online classes and I have never cheated on a test (either on-ground or online). I truly think that if the learning activities are engaging, worthwhile, and challenging, student's won't cheat. For example, how can a student cheat when they're asked to supply their opinion? Or when they're asked to defend their stance on a topic? If learning takes place at a higher level (Bloom's taxonomy), then cheating becomes irrelevant.
That's just my opinion. But I do believe in what many other participants have already said: it is much easier to consider cheating in an online environment because you know you don't have to look your teacher in the face.
Depending on the type of assignment it might not be considered cheating, but research. If the student is researching the topic to properly answer the discussion questions they are actaully gining more out of it. However, if they are cheating on an online test that is a different senario. Online tests should be timed to prevent cheating.
As an instructor I am ALWAYS concerned about cheating because among other things it shows a lack of ethics among our students. Having said that I believe that we should not set up our students in such a manner that we almost expect them to cheat.
In other words when they are taking a quiz/test we allow them to use their textbooks but we set the quiz to last a specific amount of time such that the student will not have an abundance of time to look up every answer. Regarding writing papers etc. we need to be vigilant and explain to our students the class expectations when it comes to plagarism or cheating whether it be an online class or face-2-face.
I feel we should be concerned about students cheating in an online environment. There should be steps taken to minimize occurrences and definitely the student needs to be aware of the expectations and consequences of their actions.
How can we slow the process?
