How to Stop Students From Cheating

I spend a lot of time thinking about, students cheating, grades, and assessment.

Assessment is supposed to be about checking for students’ understanding, when they cheat, they’re telling us that they don’t understand. (We do have to know that they cheated in order to receive that message)

As adults talking about “students cheating”, we approach it as though it’s a thing that only they do. That we have no responsibility. In what ways do you cheat yourself? What support would help you to stop?

Do you have a “cheat day” where you eat all of the ice cream and cookies even though they aren’t good for you? Why do you do it?

Do you cheat your health by not exercising? Do you cheat on your taxes by not accounting for EVERY receipt?

This isn’t to make excuses, for students, however, it is to challenge us to assess goals and examine the best way to reach them. It’s also to challenge us to remember, we cheat and cut corners on the things that are HARD for us. Our courses and exams are not hard for us, we made them.
High stakes tests are often about ease of grading, and power. If that’s the goal, then keep doing them. If the goal is growth, understanding, try something new.

One way to lower the need for cheating is to increase the amount of formative assessment leading up to a summative assessment. What if you were sure that your students would find success in the summative assessment?

Formative assessment can be a bit harder through online learning, as you often can’t observe your students working. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.

• Add quiz questions to your videos. I like to use Vidgrid to do this.
• Breakdown big projects and review progress as students work.
• Short quizzes that aren’t graded or are graded for completion
• Have students make corrections to their work
• Use comments in zoom and ask simple low-risk questions
• Use the reactions feature in zoom and do some true/false questions
• Write a 6 word story about the day’s lesson
• Use a knowledge rating scale on a specific topic, term, or work of art