How students cheat
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Mark Stellmack
May 31, 2013, 12:31:43 PM5/31/13
to psy_te...@umn.edu
When students cheat on coursework:
- they are stealing from you and the University.
- they are violating the agreement that you made with them in the form of your syllabus.
- (and the one I think is most important:) they are cheating the other students by getting an unfair advantage and making the playing field uneven.
So as an instructor, you have a responsibility to prevent cheating and to punish cheating when you detect it.
To prevent cheating, you first have to think about how students will try to do it. Here are ways that I have caught students cheating.
On exams:
- Peeking at others' exams (one of the classics).
- When there were only about 5 students left in a lecture hall during an exam, a student paged through his textbook on the chair next to him.
- On more than one occasion in which I have had multiple forms of an exam, a student has scored zero (or extremely low) but when the answer sheet was graded against the key for the other form of the exam (the form that the student did not have), the student scored extremely high, indicating that the student foolishly copied off someone with the other form of the exam.
- A student who was not registered for my course attended an exam and helped another student. Then the non-registered student left the lecture hall with a copy of the exam, when students are not allowed to keep their exams.
On writing assignments:
- Copying and pasting text from published sources.
- Copying and pasting text from other students' papers.
- In one instance, a student in my class copied and pasted text from another student's paper in my class, and submitted that paper in a different class! The instructor of the other class thought the paper looked like one that would be written for my class and asked me about it. Because I keep electronic copies of all students' papers, we were able to track down the original source.
And the current grand champion of cheating: The student who...
- Took someone else's graded quiz, whited-out the name and answers, wrote in his own name and answers, then returned it to his TA and said that his score was recorded in the online grade book incorrectly.
- Missed an exam and claimed a stomach illness. He gave me a doctor's note dated two days before the exam, but he took me to lunch as part of the "Take Your Professor To Lunch" program on the day before the exam, when he was supposedly ill.
- On the day that exams were returned to students, he showed up in a lab section for which he was not registered. He gave a false name, asked to see an exam, and left the room with it. He then contacted me to schedule a make-up exam.
If you have any cheating stories, please share them so that we can all become more aware of how students do it.
- they are stealing from you and the University.
- they are violating the agreement that you made with them in the form of your syllabus.
- (and the one I think is most important:) they are cheating the other students by getting an unfair advantage and making the playing field uneven.
So as an instructor, you have a responsibility to prevent cheating and to punish cheating when you detect it.
To prevent cheating, you first have to think about how students will try to do it. Here are ways that I have caught students cheating.
On exams:
- Peeking at others' exams (one of the classics).
- When there were only about 5 students left in a lecture hall during an exam, a student paged through his textbook on the chair next to him.
- On more than one occasion in which I have had multiple forms of an exam, a student has scored zero (or extremely low) but when the answer sheet was graded against the key for the other form of the exam (the form that the student did not have), the student scored extremely high, indicating that the student foolishly copied off someone with the other form of the exam.
- A student who was not registered for my course attended an exam and helped another student. Then the non-registered student left the lecture hall with a copy of the exam, when students are not allowed to keep their exams.
On writing assignments:
- Copying and pasting text from published sources.
- Copying and pasting text from other students' papers.
- In one instance, a student in my class copied and pasted text from another student's paper in my class, and submitted that paper in a different class! The instructor of the other class thought the paper looked like one that would be written for my class and asked me about it. Because I keep electronic copies of all students' papers, we were able to track down the original source.
And the current grand champion of cheating: The student who...
- Took someone else's graded quiz, whited-out the name and answers, wrote in his own name and answers, then returned it to his TA and said that his score was recorded in the online grade book incorrectly.
- Missed an exam and claimed a stomach illness. He gave me a doctor's note dated two days before the exam, but he took me to lunch as part of the "Take Your Professor To Lunch" program on the day before the exam, when he was supposedly ill.
- On the day that exams were returned to students, he showed up in a lab section for which he was not registered. He gave a false name, asked to see an exam, and left the room with it. He then contacted me to schedule a make-up exam.
If you have any cheating stories, please share them so that we can all become more aware of how students do it.
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