Academic dishonesty is not a recent phenomenon. In the past few months, however, it has appeared that cheating has been at an all time high. Within just two months, four reported cheating scandals arose, including Sandra McLaughlin and Kristen Dennard’s AP US History classes, Elijah Morris and Lars Melton’s AP Calculus AB classes, and Noah Biros’ AP Physics 1 classes. With the increased publicity surrounding cheating, it causes one to wonder whether cheating has always occurred at these rates or if there are new measures to catch it.
Awareness of increased cheating first occurred during McLaughlin’s AP US History class when a student leaked a copy of their test. As a result, all of her classes were administered a reassessment of the exam. This response was received with outrage and confusion by students who maintained academic integrity.
“Teachers need to deal with cheating, but it didn’t really make sense for everyone to retake the test,” said Eleanor Burton, a student in McLaughlin’s class, “I know they feel weird choosing people who are cheating, but it just feels like they don’t trust anyone.”
Soon after the incident in McLaughlin’s classes, another cheating scandal occurred in Biros’ AP Physics 1 sections. According to Biros, a student witnessed classmates copying answers off of Scantron multiple choice questions before entering them online.
“I ended up going through a process of trying to see which students that were sitting near each other wanted to make sure that the assessment data that I’m putting in valid or accurately represents what students know and what they’ve learned,” said Biros, “So trying to figure out which students did take a valid assessment and which students didn’t…was kind of a long process.”
Following his verification of student assessments, Biros then administered retests for students suspected of cheating. Biros estimates that he spent at least four hours outside of work validating tests.
The most difficult aspect of addressing cheating, Biros believes, is identifying if cheating occurred. “I want to be fair about [cheating] as much as possible while encouraging academic honesty. So it’s sometimes hard to tell [if there is cheating], but I’ve heard that it’s fairly widespread, and from what I’ve seen, it definitely does happen to a much larger degree than I would hope.”
More recently, cheating scandals have occurred in Dennard’s AP US History classes and the AP Calculus AB classes. In the case of the Calculus classes, administrators approached Morris and Melton with concerns that photos of their tests were spreading throughout the school. This notification reached the math department prior to assessment, so cheating was able to be curbed.
Dennard, however, did not have such luck. She suspects that students shared answers to other blocks after taking a vocabulary quiz on the Illuminate online testing portal. The quiz was formatted so students could view the correct answers after submission. Dennard shuffled the order of questions for each period’s assessment and observed lower class averages for her later periods and the same order of letter selection as her original class. Now, Dennard is taking intensified measures to prevent academic dishonesty, what she describes as draconian.
“We will be putting our desks into rows on quiz and test days. My students will have a folder at the corner of their desks that will block their screens from other students. Lightspeed will be on. I will have to randomize questions, answer choices, and all of that,” Dennard said.
Disheartened by her observations, Dennard cited that cheating can have major implications for teachers as well.
“Time consumption is the main and most obvious impact, but it also just makes me sad and disappointed and frustrated, and I know my students also feel that way,” she said.
Principal Jennifer Sublette provided her own insight into the rise in cheating: “I am worried that the last couple of months seems to have shown an uptick, and I think the most important element when that’s happening within a school is teachers need to remain vigilant and share with administration when they know this is happening, and students also. I’ve been glad to see students speaking up, using Anonymous Reports, and giving us information.”
Sublette went on to explain that the rise in cheating could be a result of the dissolved student honor council.
“I would love to be able to reimplement the Honor Council. I don’t see a way to do it in keeping with not just division guidelines, but actual federal guidelines around the protection of your personal student information,” Sublette said.
Because of the legality concerns of an Honor Council, there are reduced measures to enforce cheating beyond intervention through the administration team. On the other hand, new technologies to identify academic dishonesty, such as Lightspeed, could explain the increased reports of cheating.
“One of the questions we ask is correlation versus causation. Are we seeing an uptick in cheating, or are we seeing an uptick in the ability to catch it? That’s where I think it’s always the challenge. If you improve your ability to patrol and monitor, you’re probably going to find more incidents of cheating,” Sublette said.
Lightspeed or not, why does it seem that cheating is so widespread? Dennard has some thoughts: “I think that there is a competitiveness at Western that lends itself to academic dishonesty. I don’t think that students want to cheat, but I think they have placed immense pressure on themselves to get a four point-something GPA, and I think they have an immense workload, jobs, other requirements and I think that is lending itself to students feeling pressure to cheat.”
