cheating – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

Teaching Tip: Assessing Your OM Students and Academic Integrity

Academic integrity has long been a necessary consideration for educators, but last year’s abrupt move to online learning intensified questions about just how much students may take advantage of outside help. Whether in person or online, then, what can you do to minimize cheating in the first place? As we near the end of the year, here are some ways you can adjust your assessment approach to better support students and give them the confidence to succeed.

While there will always be a few students who plan to cheat no matter what, many students are driven to do so by fear. So the solution is not to amp up your cheating-detection skills. Instead, Harvard Business Publishing (Dec. 6. 2021) suggests that educators can reduce students’ inclination to cheat in the first place by better engaging them in class and giving them more opportunities to confidently showcase their knowledge. Here are some strategies OM profs can use to reduce academic dishonesty and assess student learning more effectively.

Four ways to adjust exams to discourage cheating:

Give students more assessment opportunities throughout the semester by breaking up larger exams into smaller unit-, chapter-, or topic-specific tests.
Use the Heizer/Render/Munson bank of 2,000+ test questions (and some 400 are algorithmic) and mix them up on your exams—if each student receives a different set of questions, it will be harder to share answers.
Use problems or questions that ask students to explain, analyze, and infer—to prompt unique responses.
Use some of the 850 problems from MyOMLab instead of multiple-choice testing.

Three tips for boosting test-taking confidence:

Provide practice questions so students can learn what their strengths and weaknesses are before the pressure of a real exam.
Help students monitor their own progress by using low-stakes quizzes, or one-minute paper questions immediately following the introduction of new material to give them the practice they need to retrieve and rehearse information.
Offer students the opportunity to self-correct their answers after a quiz rather than directly giving them immediate feedback. This sets the tone that quizzes are learning opportunities.

Our goal is to prepare students to demonstrate and retain knowledge through exams, not heighten their anxiety or increase their proclivity to cheat. So it’s important to consider the purpose that each question serves toward the course objectives. Exams should help students fully understand concepts and analyze ideas on their own.

Teaching Tip: Why Students Cheat–And What You Can Do About It

The Wall Street Journal (May 26-27, 2012) reviews a fascinating new book by Duke U. Professor Dan Ariely called “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty“. The essence is why normal everyday people (and, of course, students) cheat and lie. It turns out that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. The purpose of locks, says one locksmith,” is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.”

Ariely found many reasons why students might cheat. A common one was having another student in the room who was clearly cheating. Watching a mini-Madoff cheat on a test encouraged the remaining students to also do so. Cheating, it seems, is infectious.

Does the prospect of flunking or other punishment make a student less likely to cheat ? “It may have a small effect on our behavior,” says Ariely, “but it is probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of ‘I’m only fudging a little’ or ‘Everyone does it’ .”

So what can we as instructors do? Here are Ariely’s suggestions: (1) Just before a quiz or assignment, tell students to recall the Ten Commandments. In his experiment doing so, Ariely found cheating dropped to zero! The same happened when he reran the experiment, reminding students of their schools’ honor codes instead of the Ten Commandments. (2) Having students sign a vow not to cheat at the top of the exam, rather than the bottom, likewise decreased cheating. While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on students, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.

(Note: My own prosaic advise: (1) Don’t leave the room during a quiz or exam and (2) Use MyOMLab with algorithmic assignments so each student works with a different data set.)

Teaching Tip: Dealing With Cheating in Your OM Class

Today’s front pages headlines here in Orlando have centered on a sensitive topic, but one we must address nonetheless–cheating in our classes. The story concerns a B-School prof at U.of Central Florida (UCF), which is now the 2nd largest college in the US, with 56,000 students. This, of course, means large classes–often shown on closed circuit TV. In a class of 600 Strategic Management seniors, the instructor used a 300 question Test Bank (which he thought to be secure) to create the midterm of 55 multiple-choice questions. Unusually high grades led to 206 students admitting they had studied from the Test Bank.

Nationally, about 21% of students admit to cheating, with more problems on large campuses and in large lecture classes. As the DSI Meeting takes place at this moment in San Diego, maybe this is a good time to raise the issue.

Yes, Test Banks are more and more available on-line, despite threats and suits by publishers. Our own publisher has taken legal action against people using our copyright material. But some schools using our OM text actually buy copies of the Solutions Manual and Test Bank and sell them as study tools to their students. So it is a fair assumption that some “ambitious” students will try to get an edge gradewise by whatever tool is on the market.

Jay and I have discussed the problem many, many times and have tried to foolproof our system to this extent: (1) we have a massive Test Bank, with well over 2,000 questions, and a text with over 900 problems. This gives the ability to keep from repeating the same questions from semester to semester; and (2), we created MyOMLab with a goal of making it as integrity-driven as humanly possible. The key is the algorithmic nature of the on-line problems that come from the text. You can assign them “bookmatch” (ie, identical to text), or “algorithmic” (ie, where each student gets her own data).

Randomizing questions from large Test Banks, using new assignments each year, and MyOMLab are just 3 ways to deal with this visible issue. Please share your comments.