student cheating | Mrs. Ram's Jams

Now that I’m an in-person and at-home synchronous teaching master–HA–I forget to start my Google Meet at third block about half the time and occasionally talk while my microphone is on mute–I need help mastering ALL THE STUDENT CHEATING THAT IS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS ON THEIR DEVICES.

I miss paper. And pencils. And pens. And THINKING instead of Google searching and regurgitating whatever Spark Notes is telling them about symbolism in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

I’m starting to wish that Google was never invented.

I’m so frustrated because some students’ grades are complete shams. Their grades aren’t reflective of their knowledge and ability. The grades are reflective of cheating and getting away with it.

It seems like all my digital resources have been compromised.

All of the answers to CommonLit assessments are readily available to students on Quizlet.

The state curriculum that we’re using is web-based. Want to guess how secure it is? Not very. Our unit test answers are plastered all over the internet.

I can’t lock a Google Form anymore because my 8th graders don’t have Chromebooks.

I gave the kids To Kill a Mockingbird before Christmas break to read on their own and a banana-ton of questions to answer as a test grade. It’s due in two weeks. Guess what some kids are doing? Googling the answers instead of reading the book. (In hindsight, this was a terrible assignment to give them.)

And now that I’m teaching at home virtual learners who are, for the most part, unsupervised while they’re at home all day, cheating is even more of an issue. And I could be mistaken, but I think some of my in-person learners are staying home on days when they have lots of tests and logging in virtually to class so they can cheat more easily.

And while we do have Impero as monitoring software, it’s only on school devices. Some of my students use two different devices, one for the Google Meet, and one for classwork, which is fine, but I can’t see what they’re doing on the other device. This also becomes problematic when I do give locked tests through Illuminate. (Also no lesson planning or grading gets done when the students are testing anymore because I have to watch what they’re doing like a hawk.)

End rambly semi-coherent rant.

Do y’all have any teacher hacks to help prevent cheating, especially during testing, in this digital classroom era? This teacher needs help!

Here are some of the things I already do:

Their cameras must be on and their faces must be fully visible. Most of the time, my rule is eyebrows and up, but this doesn’t work during testing. No blurred backgrounds are allowed either.
I make all students push their sleeves up and show me their wrists to see if they have smart watches on. If they’re wearing one, I make the kids at home stand up and go put their watches on the other side of the room and the kids at school put their watches in their backpacks. (I personally don’t think kids should wear smart watches at school, period.)
I make the kids at home show me their phones and have them put their phones on the other side of the room too. I don’t think this actually works. Lots of them tell me that their phones are already in another room. Yeah right.
I make them have their microphones on the whole time they’re testing.
Tests have to be taken on the school-issued device.
I give tests in a locked browser if at all possible. I wish I could lock students into a Google Form or CommonLit. UGHHH.
I stalk them on Impero when I give them unsecure assessments.

Is it terrible that I delight in their looks of misery when they realize I’ve thwarted most of their reliable cheating methods? Give me more ideas so I can get my schadenfreude on!

But in all seriousness, I can’t believe that parents of in-person learners aren’t making more of a stink about how easy it is for at-home learners to cheat and ultimately get better grades.

Is there anything that parents and students hate more than grades not being fair?

I’m not a perfect teacher.

Earlier this week, I gave a two day test to my English I Honors students, giving them extra time for the assessment’s writing component. Instead of having them pause the test to continue the next day (to try to discourage cheating), I had them submit their test digitally at class’s end and reopened it the following morning. However, I forgot when they submit their answers through our online testing platform it automatically tells them which multiple choice questions they answered incorrectly. [insert Mrs. Ram Jam whacking her head repeatedly against a cinder block wall]

So what happened in first block when I reopened the test? Remembering the question numbers marked incorrect, quite a few of them changed those wrong answers to correct ones.

Instead of squashing cheating, I inadvertently allowed it to run rampant. I suspect at least 65 percent committed academic dishonesty–with no way to prove who did or didn’t change their answers.

Repeat–I’m not a perfect teacher.

I’m mad at myself for my screw-up and disappointed with my students.

But if I hadn’t caught myself after first block, would the same thing have happened all day?

Hopefully I’m wrong, and this is pure speculation, but yes. In subsequent blocks when I informed kids they couldn’t change their previously chosen answers, I saw open hostility, embarrassment, and shame on more than a few faces. (I also witnessed cluelessness. It hadn’t crossed some of their minds.)

Newsflash!

Students aren’t perfect, even the high-achieving ones.

They turn things in late.

They lie about having their homework done.

They try to figure out how to do the least amount of work possible and still get high grades.

They’re children.

They attempt to manipulate adults to their own advantage and pander to their own desires in oft convincing self-righteousness.

And also, most students at some point, again even high-achieving, good kids, cheat.

Look at the numbers.

In Andrew Simmons’s Edutopia article “Why Students Cheat—and What to Do About,” he uses a bar graph to illustrate “95 percent” of students in secondary schools “admitted to any form of cheating, 64 percent committed plagiarism, and 58 percent cheated on a test.”

Now granted, I teach 8th grade, but I teach a high school credit honors course to middle schoolers. My class is HARD. Kids, used to getting easy A’s, struggle and make C’s and B’s on tests and writing assignments. They’re desperate for an A, even if comes down to achieving one through unethical methods.

I am not excusing their behavior or my own teaching faux pas, but through self-reflection, I’ve garnered a few valuable insights.

I don’t know if all students initially recognized that their behavior was unethical. They’re smart. They saw their incorrect answers and changed them before resubmitting and didn’t think twice about it. But some had to realize their actions were disreputable. Thursday, we had a serious conversation about what happened and what the term “ethics” means. Not one student could define it when I asked them what it meant, but they know its definition now. That entire class faces consequences, including a brand new replacement test. I made them feel guilty as hell about their actions. I pulled a Danny Tanner and flipped their transgressions into a teachable moment.
I need to stop being so nice. I gave them too much time to complete the test, and if I give them an inch, they take a mile. The test should have taken them 60 minutes tops. They had to read three passages, answer 18 multiple choice questions, and write a paragraph. For benchmark, they’re expected to do the same thing but write an essay instead in 90 minutes. My reasoning behind giving them extra time was to allow them to focus in on the writing component so we could work through any constructed response issues they had before benchmark. I wanted them to do well on the test, thinking the extra time would help my struggling writers. But some students were not honest with actually being done when they fully were.
My expectations were unclear. This one hurts. I should have told them that the twenty minute window on day two was only for the writing component and the multiple choice needed to be finalized on day one. Hindsight sucks.
I admitted my own mistake to them, and I’m admitting it to you. Yes, I did. I told them I screwed up. I think it’s important for students to see their teachers admit when they are incorrect, acknowledge their own mess-ups, and examine their imperfections. Again, I’m not perfect. No teacher is. Sometimes my lessons bomb. Sometimes, God forbid, my self-made materials have editing errors. Sometimes, I don’t pronounce words correctly and accidentally say things like “more better.” I haven’t read everything under the sun, I don’t have all of the answers, and I am not always right–but I admit when I’m wrong, I’ve messed up openly, or I could have done something better. They’re under so much pressure to be perfect, and the adults in their lives need to show them that perfection doesn’t exist and is an unattainable ideal.

Now I have to ask . . . if you were put in their situation as a middle schooler, would you have cheated?

Because I sure of hell would have. [Loud gasp! How dare you, Mrs. Ram Jam!] In middle school and high school, I copied my peer’s homework or let them copy off me. Senior year, I plagiarized a Spanish IV paper the week before graduation, submitted it, and got caught, justifying my behavior because I felt wronged by my teacher. (If you’re reading this Señora Blakenship, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart.)

If you’re judging me for my confession, look at the statistics above. Chances are, you cheated at least once in some capacity yourself, whether you’re willing to confess it publicly or not.

And your child will probably, too.

It’s an epidemic, and I have no idea how to battle it. (Besides not releasing answers BEFORE a test is over. I will FOREVER be kicking my own ass over this one.)

Works Cited:

Simmons, Andrew. “Why Students Cheat-and What to Do About It.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, http://www.edutopia.org/article/why-students-cheat-and-what-do-about-it.

Mrs. Ram's Jams

Tag: student cheating

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