For a number of reasons, cheating in both high schools and colleges rose strongly during the pandemic, and continues to rise. This come from surveys of cheating (probably underestimates) as well as college’s reports of cheating (see this NPR article).

Here are some data from ProctorEdu:

Although educational institutions come up with new, stricter regulations and honor codes, academic dishonesty remains a serious cause for concern. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) gives statistics showing that, whereas in the 1940s only 20% of college students admitted to cheating, nowadays the percentage has increased to 75 – 98%. Another study, conducted by Dr. Donald McCabe in cooperation with the International Center for Academic Integrity, showed that 95% of students confessed to having cheated in some form (plagiarism, cheating on a test, etc.). This survey involved 70,000 students (both graduates and undergraduates) and was conducted for 12 years (from 2002 to 2015).

95%!!!!!

There are more data from McCabe’s study here.

Anecdotally, I’m also hearing a lot more from my colleagues about cheating in their classes, though of course that’s “lived experience”.

There are a number of reason why cheating, which includes direct cheating on tests, plagiarism, and other forms of academic dishonesty, has risen so sharply. Of course there’s ChatGPT and other bots that can write answers for you. But there’s also greater opportunity for cheating when learning and test-taking are remote, when profs allow open-book exams as well as cooperation on assignments or tests, and allow students to retake tests for higher grades. There’s also the increased entitlement of students, who now see themselves as consumers of a product and adopt a “customer is right” mentality, the general malaise of students during the pandemic, and, sadly, the fact that (or so I think) professors don’t really care that much any more. This has all led to grade inflation, so that soon every student will graduate with straight As and grade-point averages will be nearly useless as an index of merit.

All of these points are emphasized in this piece by Suzi Weiss on her sister Bari’s website, The Free Press.

Click to read:

The major flaw of the article is that Weiss relies on anecdotes and interviews, giving few statistics (which do exist). She doesn’t even cite McCabe’s study. But in the main she’s right that cheating is skyrocketing.  Here’s the “evidence”, though I’d prefer data:

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.”

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.”

Amy Kind, a philosophy professor at Claremont McKenna, said that, at the prestigious liberal arts college just east of Los Angeles, “Cheating is a big concern among the faculty.”

What amazed me are two things: how lax the faculty are in monitoring cheating, and how clever the students are at cheating. (One site estimates that 95% of them get away with it.)

Here are four ways that students do it:

1.) When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes.

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me.

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten.

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them.

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

I presumed that Sam Beyda is a pseudonym, but I there is a Sam Beyda online who goes to Columbia and will graduate this year. My apologies if this is not the one mentioned above.

This next case is heinous and redounds to the professor’s laxity; it comes from a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania.

2.)  This past semester, in her Intro to Accounting class, students took the midterm online—but in a proctored classroom using a browser that alerted teaching assistants if anyone navigated out of the exam in search of illicit information. To access the browser, students had to log in with an individual code given to them after they showed up for the exam.

Sounds pretty airtight.

Not so fast.

No one checked IDs to make sure the students enrolled in the class were the same students taking the final. Cheaters in the class paid fellow classmates—the ones who stayed in the proctored exam room—up to $100 to send them the codes so they could log in from outside the room, where they were free to look up information on their phones or brainstorm answers together. In case the Olds got smart and thought to track students’ IP addresses—that is, where they actually were—students reserved study rooms in the same building as the exam room, Huntsman Hall, making it appear as though they were physically there. (It’s unclear whether any proctors thought to check.)

The average on the midterm was around 80 percent. In past years, it was closer to 60 or 70 percent. “It’s not that the teachers got miraculously better at teaching the content or that the kids are smarter,” the University of Pennsylvania sophomore told me.

She added that the class was graded on a curve. “I’m getting screwed over for doing the right thing,” she said. “It’s a disadvantage not to cheat.” The student received a C on the test.

This could have easily been avoided by checking IDs. (But who would think to do that?)

3.) At Tufts, sources told me that crib sheets have gone digital, with students uploading course material to their Notes app and using their Apple watches to access information while taking tests.

This is why I was always present during exams, roaming the room. Surely you could spot students constantly looking at their watch! But how nefarious!  And, finally, this fiendishly clever method:

4.) And at Dartmouth—once the reserve of the WASPiest of the WASPs, in beautiful, cloistered Hanover, New Hampshire—an anonymous source told me that students have developed the habit of breaking into groups of four when given online multiple-choice quizzes. Each guesses a different answer (A, B, C, or D) to each question. Because students get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a second time. And wind up with a perfect score.

They don’t even have to read the question. If you’re reading the question, you’re doing it wrong.

Well I could rant about how students are taking advantage of the system, especially remote learning, but the professors are certainly enabling this behavior, apparently because they don’t care, and also because younger and untenured faculty and instructors stand to lose if they get bad student evaluations.

But I will rant no more except to say two things. First, cheating robs the students of what college is (or was) supposed to be for: the joy of learning and being exposed to new and challenging ideas. Second, I’m glad I’m not teaching any more. Not only would I have to deal with all the above, but you have to watch what you say in class very carefully lest you get reported and disciplined. (This isn’t so much the case at the University of Chicago.)

UPDATE: Apropos of the last paragraph, reader Roger just informed me of this article in Reason magazine (click to read):