Erin Scott

By Ann Michaelsen

Students sit in the test-taking room, with full access to computers and wireless connections. As they work on national exams, they can be seen accessing the Internet from time to time. Are the results from this test going to be corrupted because these test-takers are not isolated from global information resources?

What is high-tech cheating exactly? Is it really a problem, or do our old-school definitions of cheating need rethinking?

Most educators agree that students must meet certain requirements if they’re going to succeed as citizens and workers. “The term ’21st-century skills’ is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world, according to Education Week.

But when you look closely at these competencies and think about how students perform on exams, it starts getting complicated. What qualifies as cheating and what qualifies as a natural extension of learning, when students are increasingly expected to apply online research skills to find specific information in the vast ocean of facts and data?

WHAT DENMARK HAS LEARNED

In November 2009, 14 Danish upper secondary schools used the Internet during written exams, and a follow-up report  in 2010 by a group of auditors concluded that the experiment was a success. “The Internet is an integrated part of students’ everyday lives and education so this development is natural. The experiment shows there is a range of positive effects,” the Danish minister of education is quoted as saying.

What went on in Denmark classrooms during the testing experiment? A BBC reporter, who visited the school, reported that during the exam, students are limited in their Internet use and violating the rules is considered cheating, which can carry a severe penalty. But the most significant part of the report is not about Internet use, but about the test itself.

“The teachers also think the nature of the questions make it harder to cheat in exams. Students are no longer required to regurgitate facts and figures. Instead the emphasis is on their ability to sift through and analyze information,” the reporter says.

“Our exams have to reflect daily life in the classroom and daily life in the classroom has to reflect life in society. The Internet is indispensable, including in the exam situation,” says Minister for education in Denmark, Bertel Haarder.

If this is a success in Denmark — dating back to 2010 — why aren’t more countries doing this? Minister Haarder predicts: “I’m sure that it would be a matter of a very few years when most European countries will be on the same line.”

IMPLICATIONS FOR STUDENTS

What then are the implications for students and how will this alter the way they work during their exams? My English class at Sandvika High School in Oslo, Norway will be participating this month in a national trial for using the Internet during examinations. The Norwegian Department of Education sent out an invitation to all high schools in February, asking for some innovative “connected” schools to take part. The testing will only involve a small number of schools and students.

Since Norway’s first experiment involves a small number of students, the exam questions will not be changed in any way. All students will take the exam across the nation — the only difference is that one group will have full access to the Internet. Searching is allowed, communicating with each other during the exam is not. The difference for participating schools is that students don’t need to memorize information.

It’s 2012. Why is looking up information during an exam or test considered cheating? That’s how the world works. No one is expected to know or remember all the facts and information available out there.

The world is constantly changing and keeping up with even the most important new content is difficult. Imagine writing about global challenges like famine, drought or global warming without being able to look up any information (these are topics likely to be addressed in the exam). Instead of barring the Internet, students should be taught how to filter the information, judge its credibility, and use it to build logical arguments and greater understanding.

We should concentrate on getting our kids online and “Net Smart,” as Howard Rheingold advocates in his new book. Searching online can be time consuming, and under the pressure of timed exams, students will have to be very careful about the minutes they spend searching online. That is my main concern. Test-takers who will have access to the Internet need to practice: Where will I find reliable sources? How much information do I really need? When must I stop searching and start writing? And how do I document my sources?

Students participating in this trial say their biggest challenge will be identifying reliable sources. But they’re also afraid that since they have online access, they will be judged differently. The ministry of education has promised this is not going to happen, and the teachers grading these exams will be monitored carefully.

If communication and collaboration are valued 21st-century skills, it will not be possible to hone these skills unless exams are changed in radical ways.

Ann Michaelsen recently joined PLP’s new international Board of Advisors. She will write a follow-up after her students participate in Norway’s experiment and share some of the experience with us.

A version of this post originally appeared on Voices from the Learning Revolution.

B. Gilliard

A report released today by the plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn confirms what a lot of teachers already know: that students are copying content from online sources. According to the report, for both high school and college students, Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers were the top two most popular sources of lifted copy.

But another interesting fact emerged from the report about the difference between high school and college students. While 31% of content matches for high school students came from social and “content-sharing” sites (like Facebook or Yahoo Answers), just 26% of the matches for college students originated there.

College students were more likely to use content from cheat sites and paper mills, the report finds: 19.6% of content matches in college students’ papers came from those sites, whereas just 14.1% of matches to high school students’ papers. College students were also more likely to turn to news sites — 16.6% versus 12.3% of college students. And even though Wikipedia was the most popular source for copied content, encyclopedias in general constituted roughly 11-12% of content for both populations.

The data from this report comes from TurnItIn’s own business: some 128 million content matches from 33 million student papers (24 million from higher education and nine million from high school) over a one-year period. That is, when students’ papers were submitted to TurnItIn, its system found passages from those papers matched content available on the open Web.

The report doesn’t indicate whether or not students cited these sources (it’s likely that many did). And TurnItIn doesn’t always catch plagiarized material from behind paywalls — sites that require subscriptions, for example, like many academic journals may not be included in what TurnItIn indexes.

TurnItIn’s report backs up a recent Pew Research Center survey, which showed that more than half of college presidents said that they believe plagiarism has increased among their students over the course of the last decade. None of this is surprising, of course. The “copy-and-paste” functionality  and the massive amount of online material available makes it a lot easier to take whole sections of a Web site and plop it into one’s assignment. As long as the source is cited, of course, it’s not necessarily considered plagiarism.

To help combat plagiarism, TurnItIn makes a number of suggestions for educators: make your assignments plagiarism-proof, the company suggests. Help students better understand citations. And — of course — the company recommends schools use a service like TurnItIn.

Recently we looked at some of the factors that may be behind our “culture of academic dishonesty.” Is it simply that students are taking advantage of easier copy-and-paste technology and online resources, or are there other issues at play? For example, what are the pressures on college students that make them far more likely to turn to cheating sites than high school students? What are the reasons why high schoolers turn more to social sites? How can we take advantage of their interest in working with their peers while helping them learn not to simply copy from them?

How can we address these factors, while creating better assignments — ones that reward creative thinking — and offering better instruction about citation?

B. Gilliard

You’ve heard the stories: Cheating in Atlanta, Georgia. Cheating in Washington, DC. Cheating in Long Island, New York.

Academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and cheating are hardly new. And as the history of the banking industry and baseball demonstrate, cheating scandals aren’t just limited to schools. With numerous incidents making headlines in recent months, however, questions are being raised about the validity and the pressures of standardized testing, as well as the security of testing practices. And some are asking if it’s time to scrutinize the underlying behaviors and motivation for all this cheating.

Is the pressure to score high — not just on standardized tests, but in all facets of school life — leading to a rampant culture of academic dishonesty? Or is it simply that technology is making it easier to cheat?

Some studies indicate that cheating is at an all time high — or at least, students’ willingness to admit they’ve cheated. Some 75% of college students admit that they’ve cheated at one point or another during their academic careers. That’s up from 20% of students back in the 1940s.

According to these studies, the types of students who are cheating has changed, too. It isn’t necessarily the student who’s struggling to do well in class who’s cheating; it’s top-performing students who are feeling the pressure to perform better. A recent article in Psychology Today cites one student saying, “I was in honors classes in high school because I wanted to get into the best schools, and all of us in those classes cheated; we needed the grades to get into the best schools.”

The pressures to test well are extending beyond students now too, as the cheating scandals in Atlanta and DC and elsewhere suggest. Students are cheating. Teachers are cheating. School administrators are cheating.

That Psychology Today article, written by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, posits that there may be something about the structure of the school system that is becoming a “breeding ground for cheaters.” He argues that by being forced to spend time doing work they do not choose, students are unmotivated to learn. Furthermore, in a climate where they’re told what really matters are grades, students turn to cheating (rather than to learning) in order to do well.

“One of the tragedies of our system of schooling,” he writes, “is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others’ judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.”

Despite all the new ways that students can learn now — via Web tools and mobile phone apps, for example — it seems as though without a shift in this culture, cheating will continue. Indeed, I stumbled upon a Web site yesterday with instructions on how to cheat the point system on Khan Academy. Rather than earn badges by watching (and hopefully learning from) the videos, the author of the post demonstrated how to artificially inflate one’s points. Khan himself said he’s heard from teachers that students try to “game” the system, and his engineers are working on finding ways to thwart those efforts.

Many people point to Khan Academy as a site that epitomizes a system that encourages self-paced, self-motivated learners to thrive. What does it say, then, that there are already cheating sites aimed at gaming that system?