A professor who witnesses cheating in a chat room between students talks about the reality of cheating
Now that school education is moving online due to the effects of the new coronavirus infection, the problem of 'cheat', which has lowered the hurdle, has also been raised. Matthew Crump, an associate professor of psychology at City University of New York, who witnessed such cheating, describes his experience.
My students cheated ... A lot • crumplab
In August 2021, Mr. Crump was trying to give the first lecture of the semester online. As soon as he started the lecture, one of the students posted a link to join the WhatsApp chat group in the class using chat, so Mr. Crump also attended.
Today's students use a variety of methods to communicate with each other about the course, especially while taking online classes. WhatsApp chat groups are one way to do this. Crump says these group chats are perfectly legal and provide students with a lot of course information and an active social network.
A day later, when Crump went out with a friend, his cell phone was filled with WhatsApp chat notifications, so Crump decided to mute the chat. He said he had completely forgotten about chat for the next few months.
However, when Mr. Crump suddenly opened the chat, he noticed that the picture of the 'test question' shown in the lecture was posted in a healthy chat to discuss the deadline of the assignment and the course. It is said that the deadline for the test questions that Mr. Crump gave once a week was 23:59 on Sunday, but at around 19:00 on Sunday, the chat suddenly became lively, answering students who did not attend the lecture and comfortably. It was said that the students seeking the answer were having a conversation in search of an answer.
'The test was a personal task and we didn't expect students to talk to each other or share their answers,' Crump said. Crump attended the chat room without revealing his identity, so none of the students were aware that the professor was lurking in the chat room.
When I investigated the tendency of students to cheat using the R language, which is a programming language that Mr. Crump is good at, it was found that 70 people, about 75% of the total, were cheating within two weeks, and I made it myself. We succeed in identifying 97% of students from programs that refer to phone numbers.
There is a lot of cheating in the chat room, and some students are actively involved in the cheating and the chat itself, while others are not, but if you look at it, you will notice the cheating. No student reported in chat.
Regarding this, Mr. Crump said, 'The rule of whether to tell cheat to students may be ambiguous, but knowing and not telling it can be against academic
Therefore, Mr. Crump had to widely inform the entire class of the violation and submit individual documents to each student, and decided to have each student provide information on what they did from a separate form. ..
Of course, some students cheat on each quiz or the first mid-term test, while others cheat only on some tasks. These are obvious violations of academic integrity, and although Mr. Crump thought that the disposition was appropriate, he eventually gave a penalty of 1 for each fraudulent act and settled on a system of failing after 3 times. .. Crump also said that some students came to apologize.
Also, some students told Mr. Crump what was going on in the chat room. The student doesn't know that Crump is in the chat room, so with a chat archive, he told Crump that 'an app like this is essential for student interaction' and 'can prove that you're not cheating.' I heard you told me. 'I was afraid of retaliation from other students,' he said, saying he didn't report any misconduct. 'It's terrible,' Crump said.
Mr. Crump also changed the format of the second mid-term test, which he had recently prepared, in an attempt to prevent cheating by having all students take the test at the same time and giving each student a different task. However, in the second mid-term test, there was a problem that the problem was not distributed on time, so the chat room of WhatsApp was filled with a huge amount of text messages. After the problem was distributed, it was natural that screenshots of the problem and cheat messages to answer it also flowed, but since the amount of messages was 10 to 50 per minute, 'The flow was too fast, so what? It was impossible to track what was happening, 'Crump said.
However, it is a fact that cheating still occurred. It was said that Mr. Crump had the discretionary power over such actions, but Mr. Crump did not dare to fail, and decided to create an alternative syllabus and create a new assignment for all students. Crump believes that this will give everyone a chance to cheat again, and students who don't cheat will have more interesting tasks than before, so it will be fair to everyone.
However, there was one more condition for students who cheated. It is 'Academic Integrity' that requires students to submit a sentence 'Prove that you understand the meaning of acting according to high personal and academic standards of integrity as a student with a sentence of at least 150 words.' It was an issue. Only after clearing this task would an alternative syllabus be given.
'I knew that students were looking for a second chance, but I didn't know how many would accept the alternative syllabus. Clearing the Academic Integrity challenges is also admitting cheating. Yes, some students seemed to disapprove of anything, so I was thrilled when the first Academic Integrity assignment was submitted. ' However, the text was copied and pasted from the Internet. Crump gave the student a third chance and warned the entire student, 'Don't copy and paste.' As a result, some people have sent sincere sentences.
In the next semester, Mr. Crump will teach new students, but he said that there were signs of cheating again. However, this time, a student who knew what happened in the previous semester was urging them to stop cheating by chatting.
'Overall, they were great students. They gave good reviews to everything they did this semester,' said Crump, who is pleased that things have changed. Mr. Crump has been hiding in the chat room for two semesters, but in the end, his existence never came to light. It seems that the students made various hypotheses about the fact that Mr. Crump was informed of the injustice, such as 'It is the work of a postdoc who is dissatisfied.'
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