Interesting article on cheating at two Australian Universities. See this link to the Melbourne broadsheet, The Age: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/06/1041566360939.html Kind regards
This brings up a major pet peeve of mine. Many professor's choose to have "group" work to show student's how work is done in the "real world". In the scholastic area though, most group work consists of one student doing most of the work and very little input from others. If an employee does NO work, they would be fired, but in the scholastic arena get a good grade. Or in the instance of the student who does all of the work reporting this, they have conflict, which usually results in no punishment or problem for the student lacking in performance. In my opinion it is a way out for Professor's to have to read papers. It cuts their work into a fraction, while the student suffers.
What about the university that used to be Australian, but is in the process of relocating--Greenwich? Did Greenwich have this kind of problem as well?
I remember reading that Australian universites not recognising DETC accredited degrees..... I think DETC accredited degree holders are far better than Monash and other mentioned university.
The results in the article come from a survey of two Australian universities. These universities use the same mix of assessment processes – written and multi-choice exams, essays, term papers, group assignments, and so on – as most other Australian schools, so it is reasonable to infer that the results are typical across the country. Human nature is human nature, so it is also reasonable to extend the outcomes to the rest of the world as well. Yesterday I undertook a quick straw poll of three people (which includes me) in my office. All said that “blatant” cheating in exams, such as sneaking in cheat notes or getting someone else to sit the exam for you, was out but all admitted to “softer” cheating such as colluding on assignment answers and “massaging” someone else’s work into your own. The Internet wasn’t about when we did uni, none of us had the opportunity to plagiarise that. How do we stop it? Buggered if I know. The hardest assignments I had were the group assignments where each member of the group had to give a presentation to the class. This meant you had to pull your weight and know your stuff. As far as DE is concerned, when it comes to marking assignments and essays, I think the vigilance and intelligence of the teacher plays a large part. For example, asking for some analysis and opinion makes it much harder to plagiarise because you actually need to understand the subject matter to know what to copy. Anyway, I think collusion on answers can often be a good thing even though, in the terms of the Age survey, it might be called “cheating”. I did my undergraduate degree by distance over six years (back in the ‘80’s). We all know how hard it is to maintain your focus over such a long period when you are studying alone at home without personal contact with peers, teachers, etc. Perhaps the only thing that kept me going though some of the difficult subjects - when the end seemed so far away - was that I was able to see a mate who lived close by who was also doing the dame course, and we would go through the assignments together. Sure, our answers would have been near identical, but my understanding of the subject matter was so much higher because of the discussions we had. Kind regards
Not quite correct. The University of Action Learning (Boulder, Colorado) was found to be delivering degrees in Queensland. That's a no no, as they must be evaluated by the Queensland HIgher Education Division. As for recognition of DETC degrees by Australian universities - it is up to each individual university. NOOSR presently do not have a position on DETC degrees Erm, would you care to quantify this rather broad, unsubstantiated comment, or would you prefer to creep back into your hole? I suggest the latter my friend. Cheers, George
More on the university cheating story in Australia, this time from a Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph: http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,5809582%255E21302,00.html BTW, if anyone ever gets the desire to troll through the Australian newspaers, you can find just about all of them here: http://www.nla.gov.au/npapers/ Kind regards
Another cheating story, this time from the Melbourne tabloid, the Herald Sun. (I'll stop now.) http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5814529%255E661,00.html This is the case of an Asian student paying someone else to sit an exam. In no way would I excuse that behaviour, but in a recent conversation iI had with a faculty head at the University of Tasmania, he told me that non-English speaking students often are at a disadvantage in exams simply because it takes them extra time to deal with the language. He said that when foreign students are allowed either extra time or assistance, such as being able to ask someone to explain a question to them, they do as well as local students. Kind regards
Peter I am most interested in the subject of cheating in examinations but with reference mainly to how to minimise it in distance learning programmes - because implicitly if cheating is rampant on campus it could be hyper rampant in distance programmes, which would undermine the credibility of DL degrees. This is my main concern and it is why I adhere to a strong exam regime for DL and not one that replicates the gaps that many current on campus programmes have opened up in the interests of removing difficulties that some students face with the one strike exam regime that I favour. In being candid about your own experience of collusion between students in off class assignments and projects you expose one of the problems that cannot be dodged. There is a difference between a learning process and an attestation of fitness process. The latter is what the University's exam regime measures and attests to for interested third parties about is graduates. The former is the added value of learning that the student experiences. Other than self assessed attestation - which would be useless for an employer or anybody else gaining a reliable measure of the actuall fitness of the individual - the University must choose exam instruments that are the least worse of the viable alternatives. I believe the examinations you mention - "written and multi-choice exams, essays, term papers, group assignments, and so on" - incorporate most of the worst features of an unreliable exam regime. In fact I have said so on this Board and got showered with the usual prickly ire of L------ M---- (shh, he might not notice) for my pains. Hence, I favour 3 hour, closed book, no choice of questions, graded by senior faculty, subject to external examiners and invigilated (proctored) by an independent agency, such as the British Council. Where there are non-English speakers, the same exams can be translated (expensive true, but we do it in Hebrew, Chinese, Spanish and, soon, Arabic) or they must reach a competent standard in English. The personation you mention is a problem but it can be minimised. There is of course no 100 per cent cheat proof system, especially for large numbers (over 5,000 per Diet) but the features you mention as being common throughout Australia (and I know elsewhere, too) make it much easier to cheat. Risk is measureable and one of the measures is the degree to which trust is minimised. This is the price we pay to raise the credibility of DL as a legitimate attestation system - its learning benefits are already established.
The usual authentication technology used by IT folks to protect transactions is of little value to distance learning assessment (other than for paying tuition costs). Someone transacting business online wishes not to be impersonated and guards his authentication keys. However, a DL cheater freely gives away the authentication keys because he wants to be impersonated. So I think that Prof. Kennedy is correct that proctoring is required for examinations. These proctored examinations should be comprehensive enough to make any cheating on unproctored, intermediate assessments of little concern. (There seems to be no argument against this if one believes that the Heriot-Watt DL model is acceptable…they have no intermediate assessment at all.) However, I think that some technical means could be useful. For example, a student could have a one-time authentication of his identity with photo ID during enrollment, the photo being stored digitally by the university. The university could set up testing centers with a webcam per computer so that the activities could be monitored remotely (though not necessarily continuously), thereby eliminating some proctoring costs.
Hi Bill, you write: 'There seems to be no argument against this if one believes that the Heriot-Watt DL model is acceptable…they have no intermediate assessment at all.)' I agree it is a problem. But switching out of he mind-set that says that intermediate assessment is necessary, a campus prejudice, to make sure that the students are attentive between exams, and to ge them to take the mid-term assessment seriously, we have to count the intermediate assessment towards their final assessment, we open up more discretionary assessments, plus opportunities for cheating. It becomes a vicious circle. Our model chose final exams only as the simpler system of assessment - it minimises opportunities to cheat, not by the majority but by a minority already active on campus and a few cheats exposing (or more likely boasting) how they cheated at DL would do massive damage to DL credibility. We store over 20,000 images of HW students digitally. It is not meant as a cash saving operation as we charge a fee from each student for their exams and across over 300 centres for 5,000 people per diet times 2.3 exams per student, we break even. Invigilation (proctoring) costs are the price of credibility - no point saving on them. But thanks for your support on the broader issues.
I have a brilliant plan that I will commercialize as soon as I get funding from the saps^H^H^H^Hexperts on this board. Upon registration, each student will have a sample taken for DNA fingerprinting. Then when exams are written, a needle will emerge from the back of the chair, and will take and automatically analyze a sample. If the DNA fingerprint matches, the student will be allowed to proceed. If not, the needle will immediately inject a fatal dose of diphacinone -- thus resolving the cheating problem permanently. Your donations please... Buphagus
This seems analogous to saying that having a single security checkpoint at an airport (as opposed to several checkpoints) minimizes the opportunities for someone to sneak a weapon through. Sure, they need to accomplish the sneaking/cheating fewer times, but implying that it reduces the chances of it occurring just doesn't make any sense to me. I would intuit that a greater number and frequency of assessments would make it more difficult for a student to cheat his or her way through an entire course, not easier. Could you explain the reasoning behind your position?
Would it not be a more effective deterrent to have the needle emerge from the BOTTOM of the chair (worse, a blunt needle)??
There doesn't seem to be any disadvantage to saving money for the same level of validation, except for bragging rights: Uni A wasted twice as much money on invigilation as Uni B, so they're clearly more reputable. Or...the money saved could be spent on faculty salaries...nah.
Gary: not all analogies work, some are more rhetorical than relevant. Airport insecurity as you sketch it and our exam security are not analogous. If anything our exam regime is tighter than most airport 'security' regimes around the world. You can have frequent examinations on campus - all the people concerned are in one place - but in distance learning, the people concerned are spread across the world. As the frequency of sub-tests counting towards a final assessment increases, the costs of examining and the opportunities for cheating increase too. The managerial problem is how to ensure that the performance that is being measured is an assessment of the relevant candidate, unaided for the duration, and, indeed, it refers to the person named on the attestation of fitness. Hence, a course consisting of several discrete subjects (like an MBA) can be assessed by final exams distributed throughout the course programme on a 'pass or perish' principle. If the regime is secure (as I have described eleswhere) compared to its alternatives, the incidence of cheating falls and the certainty that it is the relevant candidate's performance being measured rises. As our MBA consists of nine final exams (one per subject) in a regime of high relative security and subject to statistical measurement across about 10,000 instances per major Exam Diet (twice a year) and 4,000 instances per mini-Diet (twice per year) in over 300 centres, all invigilated by an indepedent agency (the British Council), cheating is minimised because there is less variation in the system and fewer opportunities to cheat because the means of cheating in a set system are knowable and observable in those tasked to ensure students do not cheat in the controlled environments of an exam room, operating under our procedures. Bill: Exam regimes are not a waste of money better spent on salaries, or anything else! If you charge the student candidates a separate sum for their exams, set to break even in aggregate, and the aggregate sum covers the necessary costs (as ours does) no money is 'wasted'. The per head exam cost not only is a clearly identified charge, its purpose is also clear, namely, to provide an exam regime that is tough but fair, assesses the persons it is supposed to assess and, by being less worse than its alternatives, also protects the integrity of the DL degree award. It produces more certain value to the attestation of fitness of the candiate than many on campus forms of 'examination' and certainly higher value than those DL 'examinations' that are open to widespread abuse. The more variable the forms of assessment used, especially in unsupervised environments (at home, off campus, in groups, open book, pre-sighted questions, conferring allowed, etc.,) the more variable the forms and degrees of cheating and the more difficult to deter and observe instances of it. Explanations of unusual variabilities in performances and of common errors in answers (including similar but unusual phraseology) become too difficult to prove if the connecting events are in the recent past and were not observable anyway.
