Part I: I got in
Last semester I witnessed the worst cheating in a course I’ve ever seen. And, I’ve seen stuff.
I’m debating right now whether or not to write my account of what happened. Leaning toward writing this. And, then I’ll debate myself later on whether or not to share it…Debated…going to share. No names, or any other identifying information. Overall my students are really great. This could be a fiction. There was a lot of cheating, so the story is long. I mean this could be a podcast. It ends well too, for the most part.
One more side note. Why tell this story? Since this whole thing happened I’ve told the story a bunch of times, and sometimes I get requests to tell it. This is also a story for my future students about what not to do. So, here is a long form version. I’m not interested in outing my students, or casting shade on them. There were many fantastic students in my course while the cheating completely overwhelmed everything like a metastasizing slime mold. People cheat in college for lots of reasons. I don’t condone the behavior. I teach my courses because I’m interested in engaging students in the material. When cheating happens, it can reflect on me as an instructor and whether or not the course merits engagement. So, this is a story about cheating, but also about how I tried to turn things around and get students to engage in my course. Anyway, without further ado:
It started in August 2021. I was about to give my first lecture of the semester online. Just as quickly as I started the lecture, one of the students used the chat to post a link to join a WhatsApp chat group for the class. I joined.
As will become obvious, students are using a variety of methods to communicate with each other about a course, especially while taking online classes. WhatsApp chat groups are one of the methods. These group chats can be totally legitimate and provide students with lots of course info and an active social network. Other stuff can happen on the chat too.
A day later we were out with friends and my phone was blowing up from WhatsApp chat notifications. I scrolled through some of the messages and decided I should mute the chat. My students were having fun socializing, sometimes at my expense, and I couldn’t have my phone pinging me every time someone made a random comment on the chat. I completely forgot about the chat for a couple months. September and October were a blur. I hadn’t fully prepped the class, and I was busy making new slide decks and multiple choice questions for quizzes.
Slight detour for background.
I’m no stranger to students violating the academic integrity policy. I like to start addressing potential violations by giving students the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were naive about what they were doing. There could be a teaching moment here. I also attempt to structure my courses so that students want to complete the coursework, and choose not to violate academic integrity policies.
For example, in this course I ran short multiple choice quizzes each week. Students could take the quiz as many times as they wanted during the week. The quiz questions changed each time (pulled randomly from a pool), and students always got their most recent quiz grade. The quizzes were low stakes. I also told students that taking the quizzes would help them study for the midterms, which would contain questions from the quizzes.
Enough background, back to the cheating.
Sometime in October I was sitting in my living room trying to locate a picture on my phone. I opened up my photos app and scrolled through the images.
Then I started freaking out because my phone had obviously been hacked.
My photos app was filled with hundreds of pictures of laptop screens. Not my laptop. I didn’t take those pictures. I looked closer and recognized the screenshots. My quiz and midterm questions. It was coming from the chat.
I was afraid to open the chat. At my institution faculty are obligated to report any suspected violations of the academic integrity policy. I take that obligation seriously, and have filed numerous reports in the past when the situation arises. Even filing one report can take a lot of time. I don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t enjoy using it to fill out the reports.
I opened the chat. There they were, all those pictures, the same ones from the photos app. I had forgotten that WhatsApp has a setting to automatically save all of the media posted in the chat to my phone. I wasn’t hacked. My students were cheating like frenetic spambots. This was going to be bad.
WhatsApp has other features too, like the ability to archive and download the entire chat.
I got down to business. I needed to determine what was happening in the chat, I needed to report any academic integrity violations, and I needed to do some major course corrections for my students.
There were thousands of texts. Thousands. Not all of the texts were about cheating, or about the course. My students were having fun texting each other about stuff in general, and also about the course. One positive aspect to the chat was that students helped each other out in good ways, for example by reminding each other about deadlines, or broadcasting whether or not I was suffering technical difficulties while giving online lectures. The negative aspect was the volcano of cheating erupting since the first quiz.
There were 100+ students in the class, and a strong majority of them were in the chat. It was obvious that lots of cheating was going on, and that some students may or may not be actively participating in cheating and/or the chat itself. Also, no student reported that any cheating behavior was occurring in the chat (which would be obvious to anyone who looked at the chat). The rules around whether or not students should tell on each other for cheating may be unclear, but knowing and not telling can constitute an academic integrity violation. At the end of the day, I would have to file individual forms for each student, so I needed to figure out what each student did, and also what the consequences would be. At this point, my semester was beyond repair, and I would be spending months dealing with this.
Fortunately for me I was also able to apply my data-analysis skills to the problem of figuring out who did what. I spend most of my research life using the statistical programming language R to do all sort of things, and I knew I would be able to input the WhatsApp chat and write some scripts to help me with my cheating detective work.
Some of the students in the chat could be identified from the names they use on WhatsApp, and other students could be identified from their phone numbers. I wrote a program to cross-reference phone numbers, and voila, I had identified 97% of the users on the WhatsApp chat. Then, I wrote a script to split the chat by user and time. I could see what each student wrote/posted and when they sent it.
I read through the thousands of texts to figure out what exactly went down, and tallied up for each student whether an academic integrity violation occurred for each quiz, assignment or midterm.
The pattern was the same every week, starting from the first quiz. The quiz would open on blackboard on a Monday. Many students would complete the quiz over the course of the week. The quizzes were due on Sundays at 11:59pm. By 7pm or so on Sunday the cheating would start. Students running up against the deadline were panicking. They hadn’t done anything during the week, didn’t do the reading or go to class, so they didn’t know any of the answers when they took the quiz.
Also, by the way, I should say that the quizzes were entirely open book and open note. All of the course material was online and freely available to the students. The quizzes were individual assignments, and students were not supposed to help each other by sharing questions or answers.
Rather than searching the textbook for answers, the method of choice was to post screenshots of quiz questions to WhatsApp. Then other helpful students would reply with the answers. The Sunday night forecast was always a torrential downpour of cheating on WhatsApp.
My analysis showed the two very clear forms of academic integrity violations were sharing questions and answers on WhatsApp chat. The plagiarism doesn’t begin until later.
After two weeks of collating the data, I had a chart showing students by assignments, and whether or not they cheated on each. The next task was to fill out those damn forms.
There is a suggestion at my institution that I have an hour long conversation with each student about their academic integrity violation. I had about 70 violations. 70 hours? So…
Instead, in consultation with the powers that be, I would inform the class as a whole about the widespread violations, and also submit individual forms for each student. Although I don’t like filling out forms, it is important that individual students receive a form, because it helps make sure they understand the accusation, the consequences, as well as their right to appeal and how to get that process rolling if necessary.
I had nothing better to do so I wrote an R program to help me fill out the forms. Who knew I could automate pdf text entry from R. You learn something new everyday.
Besides filling out the forms, I had to decide on consequences for my students. There was a big range in cheating behavior. Some students cheated on every quiz and the first midterm. Some of them said things on the chat that will not be repeated here. This was as flagrant a violation of academic integrity as I had ever seen. I thought failing the course would be appropriate here. Some students cheated on fewer assignments. Some students were clearly participating in the chat and not reporting the cheating. Some students didn’t send any texts.
For consequences, I came up with a three strikes and you are out rule. I gave 0s on any assignment or midterm where cheating occurred. If you got three or more zeroes, then you failed the course. I also gave a penalty for anyone involved in the chat, even if they didn’t explicitly cheat. The penalty was zero on any extra credit assignments.
My full time job is not to detect and report cheating, and it took me several weeks to accomplish the above. In the meantime, I also had to teach my course. It was extremely demoralizing to teach to a class that was blatantly cheating the entire time. Relatedly, try lecturing online by yourself to a bunch of blank screens while subscribed to a WhatsApp chat where a vocal minority are telling everyone how they really feel. I had perma-eyebrow raise, and oh my poor feelings.
I wasn’t ready to inform them about what was going on until I had processed all of the facts, so I just pressed on with the lectures. My goal was to have all of the forms filled out and emailed before the next midterm. I tried as hard as I could. But, I couldn’t get it done. I had to give the next midterm, and I knew that probably meant a bunch more cheating. I was still on the WhatsApp chat. It would be irresponsible to look away.
I learned a few lessons from the first midterm, so I tried to clamp down and prevent another tidal wave of cheating for the second midterm. Before the first midterm an enterprising student harvested as many questions from the quiz pool as possible by retaking each quiz and saving the questions to a document. This would have taken a good amount of time to do by hand, I was almost proud, it was a form of engaging in course material. I know this happened because they shared the question bank with the rest of the class on WhatsApp. Many students got 100% on the first midterm.
I knew the students would try to harvest the question pool again for the second midterm. So, I rewrote all of the quiz questions and kept them out of the online pool. I also stopped giving quizzes and changed to written weekly assignments (I had been avoiding grading weekly writing assignments because I had many students and no teaching assistant to help me with the grading). I also changed the exam format. Previously students get all of the questions at once, and they have a couple hours to complete the whole thing. For midterm two, I turned on “one question at a time” and “no-backtracking”. As a result, every student would get different random questions, one at a time. They would have to complete each question, and they would not be able to go back to check their work. These options make it harder to cheat, but they also make the experience of taking the test worse for students. It’s not my preference for running an exam.
Another detail was that I let my students take the first midterm anytime they wanted within a week long period. There was a lot of sharing on WhatsApp for that whole week. So, I ran the second midterm during a scheduled online lecture. Everyone had to do the midterm at the same time. It would be harder for someone to get out ahead and share the whole midterm with students who hadn’t taken it yet.
OK, let’s recap. I have about 70 students on WhatsApp cheating like there is no tomorrow. I have counted what they did, I have almost filled out the forms to let them know the consequences; but, no one knows yet that I am aware of the cheating. I made the second midterm more cheat proof. I’m still on the WhatsApp chat. The day of the second midterm comes around. I log into my class so that students can talk to me while they are taking the midterm. The midterm begins, and so do the WhatsApp messages.
End Part I.
Part II: The second midterm
Spoiler alert: There’s some swear words down there 👇. I’ll do the first one. Some shit went down in the second midterm 🙀.
What happened with the second midterm? Before I get to that I’ll point out that I was invited into the WhatsApp chat in more than one way. After my first class I got an email from a student with a link to join the chat. I guess they forgot I was invited, because I had to sanction them for cheating based on their texts. Stuff like this happened all semester long. There was a lot of cheating, but it was low quality. Sometimes cheating is so impressive that it could have been an alternative assignment in the course for a grade. Not so much for what happens next.
A couple digressions. I have multi-dimensional empathy for my students. Is that a thing? It is. It means that I learn more from my students than they learn from me. There are more students than me, and they have so much more stuff going on than I do. Although I don’t condone cheating at all, I can recognize that students sometimes resort to cheating because of other life stuff going on. Plus, it was/is a global pandemic, with stress galore. So, we were all in a major life stuff happening moment.
I was also weirdly empathizing with how hard it would be to cheat in my course. I was sad and angry about the cheating, but in terms of the process they would use to cheat, I knew it would be harder than normal and I could empathize with the difficulties they were experiencing.
The difficulty was that my materials weren’t out there, it was all new stuff. I had written the textbook for the course during the summer. Students couldn’t rely on previous cohorts for the exams. It was all new. So, the cornucopia of websites offering opportunities for students to violate academic integrity principles wouldn’t be much help. For example, https://www.chegg.com, https://www.coursehero.com, and https://www.quizlet.com offer so much content and services for students. The content can be things like my old exams that someone uploaded without my permission. Or, students can hire people to do their assignments (cough, help them with their homework as a legit tutor). Because my content was new, none of it was available for easy download. I don’t know how many students hired people to do assignments in my course, that’s beyond the call of duty 🐺.
OK, the second midterm. It feels like it was yesterday.
The second midterm was supposed to start at 12:50 PM. I had it all set up and ready to go, which meant that students would
