Can we cheat-proof schools?
Friday, September 14, 2007 at 07:26AM "It's not the dumb kids who cheat," one Bay Area prep school student told me. "It's the kids with a 4.6 grade-point average who are under so much pressure to keep their grades up and get into the best colleges. They're the ones who are smart enough to figure out how to cheat without getting caught." from "Everybody Does It" by Regan McMahon, San Francisco Chronicle,Sept 9, 2007
It's time we made a serious effort in finding pedagogical means of ending cheating. When 90% of high school students admit to cheating, something is out of whack. And it is hard to point a finger an entire generation of kids.
I've addressed why kids might cheat and how one might plagiarize-proof research assignments. But can teachers help make tests and homework cheat-proof as well?
McMahon suggests Top 5 Ways to Curb Cheating
- Create an honor code with student input so they're invested in it
- Seriously punish cheaters according the academic integrity policy
- Create multiple versions of tests to make purloined answer keys useless
- Ban electronic devices in testing rooms
- Develop multiple modes of assessment so the grade is not determined primarily on tests
Of these, I would endorse last one. Here are Johnson's Top 5 Ways to Curb Cheating:
- Use performance-based assessments that require personal application of or reaction to the topic
- Be very clear about what will be tested/assessed
- Make every assignment a group assignment with expectations that the role of each group member be clearly defined
- Only make assignments that are actually necessary (Alfie Kohn writes that there is little correlation between test scores and homework.)
- Eliminate "objective tests" or make them all open book.
What's wrong with the honor code business? Nothing except it seems we are in a social values shift about cheating and about property rights if 90% of a population no longer holds an older value. Personally, given my Boomer sensitivities, I think kids who cheat are little weasels. But then the majority of US citizens, by generations usually, have also changed their views on things like slavery, women's rights, gay rights, seat belts, smoking, littering, the environment, and Michael Jackson from what they were at one time.
I'd like to bang a drum about the need for a society that places less emphasis on test scores, that has a better means of choosing kids for colleges, and that values non-testable attributes of people. But you wouldn't want to listen and it wouldn't do much good. What is within the individual teacher's sphere of influence?
Anyway, read the article in the Chronicle and tell me how you would curb the cheating epidemic...
Oh, I expect to get beat up on this entry. Have at it.
