Cheating in the News - Home

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So much rides on public school students’ test scores.

They can make or break a principal’s career. Awards, money and promotions often accompany high scores. Low scores can mean state takeover or intense public scrutiny. They can lessen neighborhoods’ home values and desirability.

The increasing pressure on educators to post strong results on high-stakes tests has created ripe conditions for cheating.

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The higher-education law signed by President Bush last month demands that colleges authenticate test takers in online courses through the use of sophisticated identification technology or with exam proctors. While some high-ed officials believe the law will help lend greater credibility to online learning, others say the new mandate is largely unnecessary.

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A national survey of 25,000 high school students conducted from 2001 to 2008 found that 94 percent admitted to cheating in some form or another. Sixty-five percent of students confessed to cheating on a test; more than half admitted to plagiarism.

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Although Mr. Burns has no evidence of students’ using ChaCha for academic purposes, he was concerned enough to send an e-mail message to all of his fellow faculty members at Delaware explaining what ChaCha is and how it could be used. In response, some instructors at the university are reconsidering their own classroom policies. Concerns about the service were first reported this month in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Ten applicants to the Stanford Graduate School of Business and one recent graduate saw their GMAT scores cancelled early this month by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) due to their involvement with an illegal test preparation Web site.

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Undercover police detained thirteen people suspected of charging Peruvian students up to $1,200 to help them cheat on the admissions exam to get into the National University of Callao.

To lure students willing to pay their price, criminals distributed thousands of fliers at the university itself and at a university preparatory academy in San Juan de Lurigancho.

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In an age where a new cheating/corruption scandal is front-page news nearly every day — think Enron, Barry Bonds, Eliot Spitzer, and Marion Jones for starters — it is perhaps not surprising that dishonesty is a problem on most college campuses.

Academic dishonesty, which runs the gamut from plagiarizing to purchasing papers and theses, sharing answers on assignments, taking another’s exam, and failing to do work for a team project, is, unfortunately, part of the college experience for many students today. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University and Washington State University surveyed 5,331 graduate students at 32 universities in 2006. Of these, 56 percent of the graduate business students and 47 percent of the non-business graduate students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past year.

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As Levitt and Dubner reported in Freakonomics, Arne Duncan, the CEO of the Chicago public schools, contacted Levitt and Jacob after their paper was published and asked for their help in catching the cheaters. Duncan and the economists chose 120 classrooms—some classrooms with suspicious results, some regular classrooms as a control—and retested them, but with officials from Duncan’s office overseeing the test, rather than the teachers themselves. When the test results came back, the scores from the classrooms with suspicious results had dropped sharply. A dozen teachers were fired, and as Dubner and Levitt write in their book, “The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent.”

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This year has marked the apperance of postyourtest.com a Web site created by Demir Oral, a graduate of Saint Louis University’s MIS program. The site has caught the eyes of a few universities and some skeptical professors. 

The controversy surrounding the site stems from its ability to let anyone view tests from other universities. The site is mostly user-run; all tests, quizzes and questions on the site are uploaded by students or professors who choose to release the information on the Internet.

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The use of data forensics for certification exams is becoming common place among the certifying agencies, and not just in the IT industry. Caveon Test Security is one company that provides data forensics analysis as one of its test security services. Last week I spoke with Caveon president John Fremer and chief scientist and master statistician Dennis Maynes to learn more about how data forensics analysis helps to find anomalous testing behavior that could indicate cheating.