Honor On(the)Line

When I was studying to be a teacher a professor told my class that “cheating will occur when the incentive to cheat is high, and the risk of detection is low.” I have found this to be a wise observation.

Several months ago, an article in Inside Higher Education caught my eye. In it, the author of a study on cheating suggested that “the more distant students are, the more disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize cheating.”

Many schools have had honor codes for decades, signed by hundreds of students who have passed through their institutions. The schools stand firm in their conviction that the code helps to assure that students “do the right thing” by fixing their moral compasses on higher ideals and a shared sense of purpose. Should students lose their way, the honor code and its accompanying judicial procedures help the students back to the desired path.

Do honor codes founded in brick-and-mortar ¹institutions still have application to education that takes place in virtual classrooms?

Of course they do. Yet the means of achieving student buy-in to an honor code in courses where their is not a shared sense of place or student camaraderie offers new challenges to educators. If my professors proposal regarding cheating as more likely in circumstances where there is “high incentive and low risk of detection” still holds true, then one must acknowledge that observing offending behaviors in virtual classrooms is more difficult than in physical classrooms. Sure, one can insist that students take exams in proctored environments, but that kind of defeats the purpose of online education and it is disrespectful to young people.

So why not work on the other side of the equation, namely reducing the incentive to cheat?

I have previously suggested that teachers don’t trust students and that our current practices of assessing students are a major contraint on educational innovation. I also believe that you can’t bolt technology onto old educational practices and expect it to work. Yet, changing teacher habits can be very hard. There’s will always be a certain faction of the faculty that resists everything. (see Whatever It Is, We’re Against It)

What contributes to the incentive to cheat? I posit that there are several reasons:

• pressure on students to get high grades.
• mistrust that examinations are a fair measure of student knowledge, but more a guessing game about what a teacher holds to be important or version of Trivial Pursuit.
• teachers who lack them time or incentive that would enable them to author and review more creative means of assessment.
• reductionist thinking among some parents and educators who believe that something as complex as learning can be easily measured with multiple choice and other “objective” test questions.
• students who are disengaged from the course or learning in general, going through the motions, and looking for the path of least resistance.