“Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students


“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.”

That’s Garret Merriam, associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University, who recently caught 40 of the 96 students in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a take-home final exam.

[“Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer, 1665, (left) with “The Smiling Girl” by an unknown artist, 1925, (right)]

The story begins with him using Google to see if some of the questions on his final exam were online, and finding a copy of one of his previous final exams on the website Quizlet. Ostensibly a study aid website, Quizlet allows users to upload materials to the site, such as exam questions and answers, and is one of many sites students use to cheat on their assignments. He emailed a request to Quizlet that they take down the exam, which they did. But finding the exam gave Merriam an idea.

I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously​ wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were.

When the students turned in their finals, and he noticed that many of the students had selected the “obviously wrong” answers from the planted version of the final, he had to decide how to distinguish the cheaters from those who merely made mistakes. He ended up using the following standard: if there was no more than a 1 in 100 chance that the number of matching wrong answers a student gave was a coincidence, he counted them as having cheated, as he explains:

When my students turned in their finals this semester, I compared their answers with the wrong answers from the planted test. A total of 45 questions on this semester’s final were on the planted final. (The exact questions change every semester, depending on a number of factors.) As expected, nearly all students had at least a few wrong answers that matched; statistically speaking this is likely given the number of questions. I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so by coincidence. That was my (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) threshold, and anyone who matched at least that many, I suspected of cheating. (The highest match was 40 out of 45, which has a 1:10-Quintillion chance of being a coincidence.)

To my amazement, that threshold implies that 40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions. 

When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are still being determined:

I emailed these students telling them what I had done and what I found. About 2/3rds of them confessed right away or denied it at first and quickly changed their tune. The remaining third either haven’t gotten back to me yet or have insisted on their innocence. (I am considering that possibility for one student who is right ‘on the bubble’, but the rest are upwards of 1:1 billion chance, or more.)

I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.

He adds:

As you can probably imagine, this has been exceptionally stressful for me (I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.)

Professor Merriam wanted to share what happened on Daily Nous to see what other people in philosophy made of the situation and the actions he took. He had discussed it a little on Twitter, and while some people were, he says, “sympathetic and supportive,” others (for example) expressed the view that what he did was itself unethical. He disagrees:

As far as I can tell, their argument seems to boil down to the claim that my actions were deceptive or dishonest. I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’. They suggested I should have just taken the copy of my test down and left it at that. As far as I can tell most of these people are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities.

These charges don’t make sense to me. I did not encourage or nudge my students to cheat, I did not do anything to make such cheating more likely or easier. Quite the opposite: I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them cheating, and I gave them a comprehensive study guide for the final.

As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. I honestly do not see what is objectionable about that. My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating  (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)

Though he disagrees with his critics, he “open to the possibility that I might be wrong”

Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here. But I would take that possibility a lot more seriously if that were the judgment of my immediate peers (philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists), and even more so still if those peers could articulate an argument beyond simplistic accusations of dishonesty or ‘entrapment.’

So, I thought I would reach out to you and see if you could share this with Daily Nous readers and ask them: Am I the unethical one here?

That’s one question. But it might be more useful to consider more generally: (a) feasible cheat-deterring strategies for professors teaching large classes, (b) what professors should do when they catch their students cheating (when this is not settled by university policy), and (c) the extent to which professors should concern themselves with whether their students are cheating.

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Syd Johnson
9 months ago

The professor did make cheating “easier” by uploading a quiz (albeit one with wrong answers). This was not different from what others (presumably past students) have done to facilitate cheating. (One has to wonder what motivates someone to upload a quiz — one they have presumably already taken — to a website for the benefit of others. Altriusm? The Outlaw Code?) Whether it was unethical to do so is a far more complicated question. I’d be inclined to think it was a “lie of omission” that did not encourage anyone to cheat, but made it easier for those already inclined to cheat. If he plans to do it again, he could mitigate the charges of entrapment by disclosing to his students that he has planted quizzes with wrong answers on popular cheating websites.

Double A
Reply to  Syd Johnson
9 months ago

It’s not the Outlaw Code nor Altruism. Websites like Quizlet require students to either pay for access or to get access by uploading a set number of relevant documents. So the cheater uploaded the quiz to access other stuff to cheat in other classes.

Poison all these wells, with fire if possible. This guy’s alright in my book.

Samuel
Samuel
Reply to  Double A
9 months ago

That is not true for quizlet. Quizlet simply allows users to make an account, easily via google, to upload study sets and provides users with various tools for memorization and retention.

Quizlet has been used by myself for studying for courses in a completely reasonable manner that would never be considered “cheating”. For example, for a Spanish class, I would create a study set for the vocabulary for a module to study and not use that on the test, just for retention. If other students wanted to use my study set to cheat, that is one of a million options for foreign language cheating such as google translate.

You are thinking of some particular “cheating aid” websites that I won’t name, usually with paid subscriptions. However I’m surprised that this is highly upvoted given that it completely mischaracterizes the website Quizlet. I’m sure Quizlet has been used for cheating, but every application I’ve seen it used for is boring, everyday flash card studying.

Alyssa Michaud
Reply to  Samuel
9 months ago

I agree and disagree. It’s unfortunate that it has come to this. Quizlet is great for flash cards but students may need to go back to making their own. Not available for others. I am a return student (31 yoa) these students are straight up cheating. Not all but more than you can imagine. Never opening their book – using AI bots to answers questions. Something has got to give. We cant have a generation of graduates who didnt open their book. Thats scary to consider. That makes a degree worth less. The cheating will get worse as they teach their siblings. If they start flunking by using quizlet – they will stop. Chegg has many wrong answers too. These cheating sites are doing more harm than good from what I am observing.

Last edited 9 months ago by Alyssa Michaud
Alyssa Michaud
Reply to  Double A
9 months ago

I cant figure out how to delete my comment lol

Last edited 9 months ago by Alyssa Michaud
Van der Gaag
Van der Gaag
Reply to  Syd Johnson
9 months ago

By ‘cheating’ I suppose is meant effective, successful cheating, not merely acting with the intention of successfully cheating. Then he really made cheating harder by spreading those wrong answers. It’s unclear how causing someone to be unsuccessful in some endeavour might count as making it easier.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Van der Gaag
9 months ago

By ‘effective, successful cheating’ I suppose is meant partly effective, successful cheating, not merely acting to completely successfully cheat. Then he really didn’t make cheating harder by providing students with answers to copy without attribution. It’s unclear how providing material support in some endeavor might count as making it harder.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Van der Gaag
9 months ago

All sarcasm aside, there appears to be a misunderstanding. The students (a) viewed another’s exam answers online, (b) transferred those answers to their own exams without attributing them to someone else, (c) submitted their exams for credit. Each of these is an action taken to carry out their intention to cheat. They were successful in each of these actions, and Garret Merriam provided material support for each in that he served them by supplying the answers they used in viewing, transferring, and submitting. In doing this, he facilitated in carrying out their intention and thus made it easier for them to do so.

If (a)-(c) are sufficient for cheating, Merriam made it easier for students to cheat. If they are not sufficient, the students must do something more in order to cheat. Must the students do more than (a)-(c) in order to cheat? I don’t believe they do.

You, however, apparently believe they do, as you suggest Merriam didn’t make it easier to cheat. What more must they have done? You apparently believe that in order to cheat, they must have succeeded. But succeeded in doing what? Some possible options are (1) avoiding detection, (2) earning credit, and (3) getting correct answers. But none of these is a requirement of cheating.

Regarding (1): If cheating requires avoiding detection, then cheaters can never be caught and punished for cheating. For if they were caught, they would fail to have cheated. But some are caught and punished.

Regarding (2): If cheating requires earning credit, then cheaters cannot receive a zero as punishment on an exam on which they cheated. For if they were to receive a zero, they would have failed to earn credit and thus failed to cheat. But they can and do receive such punishments.

Regarding (3): A teacher “teaches” his students that 1 + 1 = 3, that 1 + 2 = 4, that 1+ 3 = 5, etc. Come test day, one student copies every answer from the student sitting next to him. But since that student answered based on the “teaching,” the copier gets no correct answers. If cheating requires getting correct answers, the copier didn’t cheat. But the copier did cheat.

It seems that in order to cheat, the students need not have succeeded in doing anything more than (a)-(c). If so, the students cheated and Merriam made it easier for them to do it.

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Syd Johnson
9 months ago

Not unethical!

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Chris
9 months ago

Why not?

David
David
Reply to  Sam
8 months ago

If I leave my wallet on the table in a restaurant when I nip off to the bathroom, are you saying *I* am guilty if someone pockets it while I’m gone?

Students made the choice to seek out answers for a test rather than complete the questions themselves. They’re responsible for their own behaviour.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  David
8 months ago

No, I’m asking a question.

Indeed, students are responsible for their own behavior. So are professors. And if professors provide material support for their students’ wrongdoing, they are responsible for that.

Last edited 8 months ago by Sam
Tyler Hildebrand
9 months ago

I teach a large (over 100 students) section of Introduction to Philosophy every year. I often give unannounced but very easy quizzes as an incentive to pay attention during class and complete assigned readings. My official and clearly communicated policy is that quizzes can occur at any time during a lecture period. Of course, it’s often most convenient to administer quizzes at or near the beginning of class.

A few years ago, a pattern developed: Some students—about 15 of them—would show up and wait a few minutes to see whether we’d begin with a quiz. If we didn’t, they’d leave. This was rude, and also somewhat disruptive to other students. 

My solution: I waited a week or two until we were discussing the problem of induction. After a quick warm-up activity, I launched into lecture. A bunch of students walked out. As soon as they left, I administered the quiz. The remaining students thought this was great. 

I found out later that some of those who had left were annoyed, but I regret nothing. The pattern stopped, and hasn’t recurred.

I have no plans to follow in Dr. Merriam’s footsteps, but I do look forward to sharing his story!

Mark Raabe
Mark Raabe
Reply to  Tyler Hildebrand
9 months ago

I love that this was done during the lecture on induction.

M Plourde
M Plourde
Reply to  Mark Raabe
9 months ago

Indeed. The irony. Peirce FTW!

Chris
Chris
Reply to  Tyler Hildebrand
9 months ago

Why is this either/or?

Pierre B.
Pierre B.
Reply to  Tyler Hildebrand
9 months ago

Were the students that were leaving performing less well on the quizzes? If not, then their behaviour was rational: they gained little by attending. “Punishing” them for not attending classes they did not need to acquire the knowledge of the cursus is just plainly wrong.

So, were they performing badly or were they just already holding the knowledge or acquiring it on their own by reading the material? I skipped some classes while at university when I was able to learn it on my own. You were just punishing self-learners by both doing these random quizzes and by deliberately doing one after they left.

Kenny Easwaran
Reply to  Pierre B.
9 months ago

Notice that these were “very easy quizzes” designed “as an incentive to pay attention during class and complete assigned readings”. There is no claim that these quizzes measure anything of what students are expected to get from the class – just as a proxy to measure if they are doing the basic work that might serve as a foundation for actually getting something from the class.

If the point of the class was to prepare people for quizzes like these in the future, then it would be reasonable to say that people who can do well on these quizzes don’t need to do any other class work. (That might be appropriate in, say, a logic class.)

But if the point of the class was to prepare people to discuss philosophical ideas and write effective analyses of philosophical questions, then these quizzes aren’t a relevant test of that. They are just a test of whether the students have read the material, which would be essential to them discussing and writing about the material, but not at all sufficient.

Gordon
Reply to  Pierre B.
9 months ago

When I taught logic, there were students who could ace the tests blindfolded (typically computer science/other STEM folks). I don’t think I had any moral obligation to penalize them for not attending .The argument that their attendance is of value for other students in the class, even if not them, is the strongest reason, but this argument applies most to classes in which discussion/active participation is crucial (most philosophy classes) ethically, I think it is a case by case basis (isn’t it always, at least in real life non torturing babies for fun cases?). I do think it is a mistake to think or encourage students to think that the value of education is the mark they get on a quiz… even if it were not a simple superficial way of checking if they tried to do the reading.

BrooklynKN
BrooklynKN
Reply to  Gordon
6 months ago

The financial aid laws have changed. Regular attendance is required to qualify. Also if you sign up for my class you are required to attend because my teaching style is dialogical and you are required to contribute to the discussion. So if you’re not there you can’t do that.

BrooklynKN
BrooklynKN
Reply to  Pierre B.
6 months ago

If the students did not need the class they could have taken something else. If they were self learners they could have taken the AP exam and tested out of the class. Yet neither of these were case I’m sure. Self learners need to sign up for classes that accommodate their particular learning style. ONLINE asynchronous classes are designed for them!

But I’m 99% sure those students who kept leaving were the same students who emailed the professor later talking about they were lost in class, requested additional help, or came back asking 100 questions about stuff that you already covered in class. They probably are also the same students who fail the class then go on rate my professor and cry because they failed.

Good students are good students. They attended class and aren’t disruptive. Your attempted defense of the ridiculous is very telling.

And attendance is mandatory, ot optional. Student are REQUIRED to attend and be present for for about 85-90% of the class in order to be counted as present. If they are on financial aid, we are required to take and submit attendance to the university for that reason. So apparently you don’t know the law either.

Student who attend class have a greater chance of passing than those who don’t. I’m a university professor and I teach philosophy. If you leave my class for more than 15 minutes you are ABSENT. I have no problem giving 10 points quizzes when students do this. What’s on the quiz?? Question 1. What is your name? Question 2. what time is it?

Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I’m with Sid Johnson: the professor did make cheating easier. That’s not good, but whether it was unethical is complicated. What I would suggest for the future is doing this but telling the students that you’re doing this. That is, tell them that you know that it’s unavoidable that some people will upload such content to such websites and so you (the instructor) have done this as well and in such a way as to enable you to tell if someone is illicitly relying on such prohibited internet content. Explain to them that the penalty for relying on such prohibited internet content will be severe, but don’t tell them which websites you’ve used or what particular content you’ve uploaded, or how you plan on detecting them via this method. The idea, then, is to give them a strong disincentive to use prohibited internet sources.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I like the idea of providing this sort of disincentive. But there’s a consequentialist argument agaisnt your suggested approach.

Your suggestion helps students to improve their cheating because it brings to their attention a further reason to carefully select resources, to vet websites, etc. in order to achieve cheaters’ preferred outcomes. Your approach is akin to telling students to watch out for the unhelpful sources of information and to consider the likelihood of incurring penalties associated with cheating. It thus helps cheaters to improve their cheating, even if it does deter some cheaters.

If you instead upload the incorrect exam answers without telling students anything, cheaters would unkowingly be undermining their efforts to receive good grades when they use the answers. When they recieve a poor grade and see that their efforts failed to produce their preferred outcomes, the disvalue of cheating becomes more apparent, and the value of hard work and study becomes more prominent. This approach would lead to an improvement in character, and it wouldn’t help to improve cheating.

The latter approach is more likely to produce better future educational outcomes than the former. And the former is more likely to improve cheating. Overall, uploading answers without telling students produces better outcomes. With this, we have a consequentialist argument against your suggestion.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Fair enough. But I guess that I think that my primary goal as an educator should not be to catch as many of those who are willing to cheat as possible but rather to prevent as much cheating as possible both by designing assessments that are very difficult to cheat on and by disincentivizing cheating. I think that this is why many object to Merriam’s approach. It’s designed to catch more people who are willing to cheat at the cost of increasing the number of people who will cheat. (After all, fewer students would have cheated if Merriam had merely removed rather than replaced the problematic content.) So, I think that we should be focused on preventing people from doing wrong rather than identifying and punishing those who are willing to do wrong in the right circumstances.

DoubleA
DoubleA
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I don’t at all agree that my goal as an educator is to prevent as much cheating as possible. There are limits on how far an instructor ought to go to prevent cheating, and I think it’s perfectly legitimate to try to determine the extent of cheating in one’s course before trying to determine how far one has to do in redesigning pedagogically value assessment to avoid cheating.

For what it’s worth, I suspect he’ll deter more future cheating from telling classes about the time he failed 40 students because they used the answers from false exam, then just from telling them he’s planted an exam.

Geoffrey Bagwell
Geoffrey Bagwell
Reply to  DoubleA
9 months ago

I second most of DoubleA’s comment here, but I must point out that at most public and private institutions in the United States faculty do not have the legal authority to penalize a student for cheating beyond failing the assignment in which the cheating occurred. In my state, for example, sanctions for violating the student code of conduct can only be issued by the designated student conduct officer(s) who acts on behalf of the entire college. Faculty are not student conduct officers. So, as faculty, I cannot legally enforce the student code of conduct. This entails, for instance, that I cannot give a student a failing grade for an entire course or remove students from the course or program of study for academic dishonesty. Circumstances vary somewhat at difference institutions, but I would advise everyone here to check your state’s laws and your institution’s regulations about who has the authority to enforce student conduct rules. Generally speaking, if your institution grants students due process rights regarding violations of the student code of conduct (and most do on account of federal regulations), then it is likely illegal for you or for any other faculty at your institution to issue sanctions for academic dishonesty beyond giving students a failing grade for the individual offending assignment.

DoubleA
DoubleA
Reply to  Geoffrey Bagwell
9 months ago

Your right, I was assuming that failing the final would entail failing the course, but that might not be true.

Geoffrey Bagwell
Geoffrey Bagwell
Reply to  DoubleA
9 months ago

That’s a fair point. At some level, the difference between giving a student a failing grade for an assignment and sanctioning that student for academic dishonesty is academic. If I give the same student failing grades for multiple assignments which makes it impossible for them to pass the course, then it looks like I have given that student a failing grade for the course on account of academic dishonesty. But, legally, I haven’t.

CLL
CLL
Reply to  Geoffrey Bagwell
9 months ago

An excellent point to raise. I was unaware of this when I started teaching and was told during an evaluation I had to change my academic honesty policy (an F in the course for any violation).

On an absurd number of occasions, I have been in a position where I could only dock a few points off a final grade for serially plagiarizing on low stakes assignments (e.g., mandatory discussion posts in online classes), which seems disproportionately lenient. Unfortunately, the student discipline office at my school (a public community college) does not take academic dishonesty seriously. I suspect they choose to turn a blind eye because of pressure from the state to value graduation rates and times over all else. We serve our students very poorly by conditioning them to expect lighter consequences than they are likely to encounter after they transfer.

Sean
Reply to  CLL
9 months ago

My only push back on this is that businesses care about results and they don’t care if I typed every character myself or found a stack overflow post to draw inspiration from. The truth is that education is slightly divorced from reality especially with regards to “cheating”.

Mark Green
Mark Green
Reply to  Sean
9 months ago

Professional bodies require ethical behaviour of their members. They expel members found to have behaved unethically. Education is precisely aligned with the professions here.

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  CLL
9 months ago

I also taught at a community college which clearly turned a blind eye to cheating. They are so desperate for enrollments and rewarded for passing everyone that they never allowed more than a slap on the wrist. I finally quit when one fifth of my class cheated quite obviously on an exam (free response) and shared an absurd error with ridiculous probability of occurring and my dean told me I was limited to only impacting that exam grade. By the end of my time there I had students standing on desk chairs cheating, attendance fraud, ringers enrolled in multiple community colleges and changes to the LMS course reports. I hope community colleges don’t wonder why enrollment is down. The cheating verges on the ridiculous!

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  DoubleA
9 months ago

Having a goal doesn’t mean there are no limits on what you should do in its pursuit. Clearly, you should have other goals.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  DoubleA
9 months ago

My point is that, qua educator, the goal of minimizing cheating should take priority over that of identifying and punishing those who are willing to cheat.

Double A
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I should have been clearer, I don’t think minimizing cheating is my “primary goal as an educator”. I do think figuring out how pervasive cheating is can take priority over minimizing cheating. Maybe this is a quibble, but he isn’t punishing them for being willing to teach; he’s punishing them for cheating. Putting up the fake exam made cheating easier, but I’m not sure how much it increased the amount of cheating (given the overlap between quizlet, coursehero, etc, just getting the old exam pulled doesn’t mean it’s gone from the internet). It certainly made cheating easier to detect.

Double A
Reply to  Double A
9 months ago

Sorry, “isn’t punishing them for being willing to cheat” not teach.

Pierre B.
Pierre B.
Reply to  DoubleA
9 months ago

Uploading your own material with carefully selected incorrect answers to cheating sites is more work than not doing it, so I fail to see how it relates to “limits on far one ought to go”?

Furthermore, the story of “how I failed studenmts by uploading fake exams” is just as effective if true or false, especially a few years after the incident were there would be few proofs if it really happened or not in the minds of students.Your bias in knowing that it did really happened is clouding your judgment: you don’t need to perform it and entrap one class and don’t need to actually upload your material to be able to provide the warning that you would do it and detect the cheaters.

Just go the quizlet and take down your material.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I certainly understand why people take issue with the practice, and I’m somewhat sympathetic. But I would’ve thought our primary goal as educators is to promote or facilitate students’ in acquiring an education. Focusing on preventing students from cheating helps achieve the goal. It’s an open question whether the approach I outlined does a better job of this than the approach you outlined, especially if we consider a broader range of outcomes instead of the narrow range of outcomes associated with one class.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Right. I should have said our primary goal vis-a-vis cheating is to minimize cheating as opposed to identifying and catching those willing to cheat.

Keen
Keen
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

The keen mind will read this as “As long as you cheat the right way”.

Charidan
Charidan
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

I don’t agree with the premise that he is facilitating cheating. The professor did not notify students of the existence of Quizlet. In order to cheat from his fake test, the student must already be aware of the cheating resource and voluntarily seek out a paper with the answers for his class.

These are students who are *already* cheating, regardless of his intervention. Abstaining from uploading the fake test answers does not stop the student from cheating, it just means they must continue their search for a cheating resource elsewhere.

It is true that some cheaters may get discouraged and resort to attempting to study legitimately, but students with a sufficiently low level is attentiveness to copy “obviously wrong answers” are far more likely to simply answer randomly and hope they get enough points to pass.

These students are not trying to learn, they are trying to get good grades, and are exploiting the flaws in our education system that those two things are not tightly connected.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Charidan
9 months ago

Is it not easier and more tempting to cheat if there’s something online that’s represented as being the answers to the test than if there isn’t? Had he just taken down the answers already up and not replaced them with incorrect answers, it would have been less easy and less tempting to cheat.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  Charidan
9 months ago

Some of the worst cheating problems I’ve uncovered have involved honor students who were certainly smart enough to do better on their own. I say this not to dispute your general claims but to expand the profile of the students we might assume are cheaters. My worst cheaters ever were truly pathological about it – they were smart people who easily could have done well on their own but were deliberately choosing to lie and cheat because it was their way. They’re out there now working in some job and doing the same kind of thing, I’m sure. These are the people who double and triple down on the lie when caught red-handed, or who cheat once, get caught, and then immediately go on to cheat again.

Alan Beddow
Alan Beddow
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

Yea and some of them are running the UK government.

xapalatka
xapalatka
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I wonder how you can predict an improvement in character. The difference between the two scenarios is that in the original one, students would know that the resource of bad answers was the teacher and in your version, they would not know why the answers were bad. How can this difference make an impact on their character? Why would your version lead them to the conclusion that cheating was wrong (rather than the conclusion you draw from the first case that the resource was unreliable), esp. if they used the website several times for other exams and they succeeded?

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  xapalatka
9 months ago

I’m not trying to predict improvement in character. It’s not my job to improve my student’s character. It is my job to minimize cheating in my courses.

xapalatka
xapalatka
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

Sorry, I was asking Sam who replied to your comment, not you. That is the reason why my question might seem to you irrelevant (because it really was to your comment).

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  xapalatka
9 months ago

My bad. I see now that it wasn’t a reply to me.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  xapalatka
9 months ago

Thanks for asking. There are many differences between the two approaches. The relevant difference between the two approaches concerns recognizing and appreciating certain value and disvalue. My approach does a better job of helping students with these things because it allows them to experience the disvalue of cheating for themselves (when getting a poor grade), and then turn their attention to the value of effort and study.

As I see it, the recognition and appreciation of the relevant value and disvalue informs character. I’m thinking of character in terms of the attitudes underlying conduct in general, not specifically moral attitudes. I’m not thinking that if my approach were used, students would come to believe cheating to be wrong (though, of course, they might), but that they would come to have beliefs and desires more conducive to good behavior. For example, instead of thinking cheating is the most effective way to achieve their goals and desiring to cheat, they’d think effort and study to be most effective and desire to work hard in studying.

xapalatka
xapalatka
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Thank you, this clarification helps a lot. Now I understand your point.

Martin Mellish
Martin Mellish
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Your approach is akin to telling students to watch out for the unhelpful sources of information…

I see that as constructive. If students start to look critically at online resources, including ethically questionable ones, that’s already a step towards them actually acquiring a critical understanding of the material. It’s somewhat similar to allowing students to bring a single-sheet ‘cheat sheet’ to an exam: the best ‘cheating’ strategy actually involves them reading and learning the material!

Martin Owens
Martin Owens
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Informationally, the more the student pays attention to the process of selecting answers, the less of the answer is cheated.

Ironic Hash

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Martin Owens
9 months ago

Not exactly: I initially believe two websites contain equally credible answers, and copy answers indiscriminately from the two without thought about the answers themselves. I later come to learn that the answers of one website are merely 50% accurate. I then select answers solely from the other, without any further thought. The attention I pay to the process of selecting answers increases without a decrease in how much the answers are cheated, as I still copy answers without any thought about the answers themselves.

Ken Mayer
9 months ago

I can’t help with the ethical issues, but the pedagogy is clear. Instead of expending the effort in baiting and catching cheaters, think about redesigning the assessments. I recommend reading James Lang’s Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674724631
One should try to design assessments that are hard to plagiarize or cheat. In the past I have offered 1-4 versions of the same multiple choice exam, so it’s easy to see if a student copied from another. I also set up question banks in the LMS that picks, e.g., one or two questions from a bank of 12 questions about a particular topic. So everyone gets exams of equal complexity that cover the same topics, but no exam is alike. That system is especially good for the reading quizzes Tyler mentioned earlier. Before each lecture, my students would be assigned a 5-7 question quiz drawing from 4-5 banks with about 7 questions each. They could take the quiz as often as they liked, and they were available weeks in advance and shut down 10 minutes before class. The questions were designed to make them curious about unusual or complicated things in the readings. It didn’t guarantee that students did the readings, but they came to class primed for good discussions that I rarely see, and it flipped the classroom in an awesome way.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Ken Mayer
9 months ago

It’s normal now (at least where I teach) for students to create a GroupMe for all their classmates to join. Not surprisingly, these often seem to turn into cheating factories. If students can take the quizzes as often as they like over a period of several weeks, then can’t the students just keep taking the quizzes until they get full points, and post the results on GroupMe so that everyone gets full credit? And can’t they then pass this along to the next semester’s students? Or am I misunderstanding how this works in your course?

Eric Steinhart
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

There’s an even better hack in cases where students are using course software (e.g. Blackboard), and can retake the quiz any number of times. For a quiz with n questions, do n iterations. On the n-th iteration, answer only question n, then look at your grade. This way you learn all the correct answers. Your final submission gets a perfect grade. I had many students discover this hack in the last weeks of this semester (strangely, they never discovered it before).

Ken Mayer
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Good points!
However, these are many small formative quizzes, so that they actually gain some useful info, and they are low stakes. Therefore building a resource for all students to crowdsource all answers to all possible questions by brute force would actually be more effort than for a student to just Google the answers to the questions that they actually receive. And for midterms and finals, they are timed and only available then.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Ken Mayer
9 months ago

Are you sure that it would take more effort, Ken Mayer? On the one hand, there’s the work of doing the readings and then attending your lectures and paying enough attention to learn from them. A dishonest student could save considerable time, it seems, by paying no attention to your lectures or the readings and then just cheating on the quizzes.

True, this strategy would not be effective if students need to pass a rigorous final and midterm under secure conditions in order to get a passing grade in the course. But if the midterm and final are cheatable (for instance, if students can take them from home, or if they can leave the exam room, look up answers online, and then return to work on those same questions), the cheating strategy seems optimal for those who just want a fraudulent credential.

TQ White II
TQ White II
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Dropping in from non-academic, non-philosophy, just a person who found this interesting.

If they keep repeating the exam until they can get the answers right, doesn’t that mean they learned the stuff?

Justin Kalef
Reply to  TQ White II
9 months ago

Not if they just try different answers at random, with no thinking, until one of them works! And not if they just copy what others have done when they hear that that works.

Prof. Mojo
Reply to  Ken Mayer
9 months ago

I’m afraid that things have gotten far worse since Lang’s book came out. The culture of dishonesty has, quite frankly, become endemic. For years we’ve been hearing our STEM colleagues warn us about things like Wolfram Alpha, which will give provide step-by-step equation solutions (in case “show your work” was required). Humanities has always had the issue of plagiarism and ghost-writing, but that’s old hat. The great threat now is AI.

In my department (historian here), we started seeing AI-generated essays at Christmas, right after ChatGPT broke out. Now, in some sections as many as one-third of all essays brought forward are flagged as AI-generated by multiple engines (NB never rely on just one, always question your students b/c tools are no substitute for investigation, etc.).

We can talk about creating a more engaging culture, and making assessments less hack-prone, but it’s whistling past the graveyard. AI is the atom bomb of the integrity arms race. It’s a matter of time (if not already upon us) before an AI can generate a semester capstone project, replete with deepfake imagery and narratives. I have sadly concluded that if you are not watching the students doing the work, they WILL default to using “unauthorized assistance.” It’s too readily available (and cheap!), it’s hard to counteract, and the overall culture encourages it.

I’m going revanchist, teaching nothing but in-person classes and giving in-person assessments (and adjusting for a timed environment and all that –I’m no monster). I am, at least, used to looking for things like crib notes and surreptitious cell phones and ear buds.

Another Philosopher
Another Philosopher
Reply to  Prof. Mojo
9 months ago

One quick point: Engines to check if AI generated the content are unreliable and it is quite easy to fool them. I would suspect that if they area flagging 1/3, many more actually use them.

MJD
MJD
Reply to  Another Philosopher
9 months ago

They also give false positives, unfortunately, as we can see by feeding in work from before AI.

Justin Kalef
9 months ago

If Merriam were to have employed someone to go undercover, posing as a student in the course, and try to lure others to use the fake Quizlet to prepare, maybe there could have been a credible basis for an entrapment accusation against him. But he didn’t do that: he just posted, in a place where none of his students had any good reason to go, a decoy that would only appeal to people who aimed to obtain a fraudulent grade by doing so.

What wrong is being done here, exactly? And to whom? To the students who apparently didn’t do the readings or attend class, and are taken in by an obviously false Quizlet as they try to game the system and make fools of the honest and attentive students? I don’t understand, but I’d love to hear what moral obligation the professor violated toward them.

I wonder what else these critics would think is illegitimate. For instance, to discourage cheating, I often prepare different copies of the same exam, so that people copying multiple choice answers from the people sitting next to them will have a fair chance of getting all the answers wrong. Is that wrong of me? Must I try to ensure that, if students try to cheat on an exam copy someone else’s answers, the cheating will succeed as planned so long as I don’t catch them? Where are these rules coming from?

We are facing a tidal wave of academic dishonesty, cultivated by years of professional indifference to the problem. The effect of all the resulting bogus credentials is a threat to untold members of society, not to mention the future of our profession. Students are showing up in our classes who have never been seriously challenged, and who have de facto been permitted to cheat their way out of every difficulty they’ve ever faced at school, because none of their teachers or principals did anything to stop it. So, they are even less equipped to handle serious academic courses today, and are even more prone to cheat. And yet, many professors look the other way and do nothing, reinforcing the cheating habit still further by reinforcing the rewards of a dishonest approach to school and life.

Where is the Twitter outrage against these enabling professors? Nowhere that I’ve seen. And yet, this.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Getting the answers wrong is already bad enough. Maybe they “cheated”, but it did not benefit them. Why enforce punishment on top of that?

Disclosure: I’m generally befuddled by professors’ willingness to discipline their students, so this is coloring my perception.

Last edited 9 months ago by Nicolas Delon
State School Prof
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

I enforce a blanket grade of “zero” for any cheating because of fairness. Students who did not cheat might get a poor grade on an assignment. They should not get a lower grade than a student who completed the assignment dishonestly. A grade of zero for any instance of cheating ensures that honest students get higher grades than students who cheated.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  State School Prof
9 months ago

I mean in this specific case: the hardcore cheaters were likely going to do significantly worse than the non-cheaters, even those who got a poor grade, unless I misunderstood the setup.

Otherwise, fair enough, though your policy requires:
1. Specific and precise rules determining cheating.
2. Active surveillance.

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

I (somewhat reluctant) punish cheating because cheating prevents learning, and I want to incentivize learning. The worse I make cheating, the more likely it is that students will do the work (I hope – it’s possible students don’t respond to incentives here, but it’s not obvious to me that they don’t). When they do the work, they learn better than when they cheat.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

You’re assuming the set of options to choose from is fixed. What some of us are suggesting is that the badness of cheating shouldn’t lead to improved detection and punishment but to alternative assessments that do not incentivize cheating to begin with.

Instead of making cheating worse you could make learning better. I dunno. Clearly I’m in the minority.

Last edited 9 months ago by Nicolas Delon
Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

Unfortunately I think a lot of assignments that make learning better are also ones that incentivize cheating. So for instance I assign reading quizzes, which students take at their own pace before the class during which we discuss a reading. The quizzes point them to important parts of the reading, help clarify confusing points, give them instant feedback about how well they understood the reading, etc. These are very good assignments for students who want to learn, but also very easy to cheat on, because students can share answers with each other.

Kenny Easwaran
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

“Make learning better” is a nice and concrete suggestion that everyone should easily implement this weekend, and then we won’t have to have any more discussions about cheating.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Kenny Easwaran
9 months ago

Hi Kenny. I’m not sure the sarcasm was needed but good to hear from you. I didn’t suggest it was nice and concrete, let alone implementable in the short run. It’s just an orientation, where I prefer to direct my finite time and energy, when others choose to direct such time and energy toward other orientations. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Last edited 9 months ago by Nicolas Delon
Justin Kalef
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

Hi, Nicolas. You say: “Getting the answers wrong is already bad enough. Maybe they “cheated”, but it did not benefit them. Why enforce punishment on top of that?

I think the reason can be seen if one imagines two students who have both got to the last week of the course without doing a lick of work, and who have no knowledge at all of the material cover. Both students should rightly fail the course. However, their behavior at this point diverges.

Student A says, “Aw, man, I really should have studied, but I didn’t. I see that now. I guess I have to go in tomorrow, take this exam, and hope that I get lucky and somehow figure out how to answer the questions correctly. It probably won’t happen that way, though, and I have to admit, I fully deserve the F I’m probably going to get.”

Student A may have failed the course, but is honest enough to take the consequences. But Student B compounds the failure to learn the material with a far worse wrong: the wrong of using fraudulent means to obtain a bogus credential. That goes beyond laziness into the realm of careless antisocial behavior.

As a parallel case: two people fail to put in the work needed to keep a job, and they both get fired. Now neither one can pay the rent without making economies. But one of them rolls with the punches and learns a lesson, and the other commits credit card fraud. Would you be opposed to treating those two people differently?

If this doesn’t convince you, please consider also that your standards have effects on the future. It’s not just that Student B shows up and gets a passing grade for nothing. It’s that the story spreads that this is possible in your classes, and that informs how students will act in future semesters.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

I’m sorry, Justin, but until you stop coming up with criminal behavior analogies I don’t see the point of an exchange. We just see the situation with profoundly different lenses.

I’ve considered my standards and they’re just fine, thank you. My students don’t cheat because I design assignments for which they have little incentive to cheat. No need for them to develop new tactics to evade detection; no need for me to develop dystopian methods of surveillance and punishment. Most of my students want to learn. Those who don’t want to move on.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

Can you explain how these assignments work?

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

Scaffolded essays, take-home exams with questions that can’t be gamed, in-class quizzes. Nothing very original.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

I scaffold my essays too, but why would that prevent or disincentivize cheating? Likewise with take-home exams: I would say those highly incentivize cheating! In-class quizzes make cheating more difficult, but as you note they’re nothing very original, so I don’t see how the use of those could be an alternative to standard anti-cheating tactics.

Chris
Chris
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

Scaffolding works to prevent (some) cheating because some cheating occurs due to desperate students who realize they haven’t started a paper that is due the next day.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Chris
9 months ago

Ah, ok. I was interpreting ‘prevent’ more strongly, but yes, I agree that it should lower the incidence of cheating a bit.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

If they are cheating it’s not working really well. There’s typically a very strong relation between how well/poorly they do on assignments on which it’s very hard to cheat and how well/poorly they do on those on which it’s feasible. If you’d like to continue assuming my students want to cheat and/or do cheat, go for it.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

I don’t understand your argument here. You’re saying that you give assignments on which it’s hard to cheat, and assignments on which it’s easy, and students generally get similar grades, and so you conclude that your students aren’t cheating? That would be an ok argument if “hard” meant “impossible”. But if “hard” just means “there are some barriers like scaffolding assignments”, then sorry, I definitely believe that some of your students are cheating, since I use scaffolded assignments and have caught numerous cheaters nonetheless. I’m not assuming something negative about your students in general. I’m just assuming that there’s a non-trivial number of students that are willing to cheat even if there are obstacles in their way. That is clearly, empirically, true, and if you don’t believe that, I’m not sure what to tell you. Maybe volunteer to serve on your university’s academic honesty committee?

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

If the students who do poorly on in-class assignments were cheating at home, I would see it, but I don’t. If the students who do well at home were cheating, they may not do well on in-class assignments, yet they do fine.

I’m sure some students cheat. I’m sure many are tempted to. Some cut corners. I’ve had a small handful of suspected cases in like five years, though it was never clear-cut enough to justify more than a warning. I let them know when I smell something iffy. But really, outright cheating is extremely rare.

I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe our students are really different, maybe my samples are too small, maybe they don’t have a strong enough incentive to do well. Students could pay others to write their exams or essays, sure. They just don’t seem to be doing it. I guess most of them want to learn.

Last edited 9 months ago by Nicolas Delon
JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

I agree that outright cheating is rare *in courses designed to make cheating difficult*, and I agree that we should make it difficult to cheat in our courses. I just also think that a significant number of students still cheat. ChatGPT is a massive temptation. I had more plagiarism (or academic dishonesty at least–using ChatGPT) cases this semester than I’ve had in the previous five years combined.

Double A
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Not to mention that admin at some places is loath to discipline any academic dishonesty because it might cause students to drop out and then they lose that sweet tuition money (not all universities are selective, many depend on enrolling as many students as they can at the prevailing rates).

I think people are ignoring the pedagogical interest an instructor has in knowing how prevalent cheating is in his course before he goes about restructuring aspects of the course to avoid cheating. Giving notice of posting the fake exam, for example, defeats this purpose. The moral criticism depends, in my opinion, on a massively inflated conception of “entrapment”. Simply doing anything that makes a bad act easier to perform isn’t entrapment. Letting students use their phones to check the time during an exam makes cheating easier but isn’t “entrapment.” Giving students have a take home exam makes cheating much easier than an in class exam, but it’s not entrapment.

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Double A
9 months ago

I think I agree with you, but one might draw a distinction between doing something that makes a bad act easier to perform but which is justified for other reasons (letting students check their phones, giving a take home exam, etc.) versus something that only makes a bad act easier to perform. One might then think this distinction makes a moral difference.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

But a greater moral difference between these cases is that, if one lets students check their phones or take their exams home, one enables them to succeed in cheating, whereas putting up a bogus Quizlet makes it less likely that they will succeed in cheating.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

A consequentialist might identify the wrong as follows:

It was foreseeable that posting the fake answers increased the number of exam failures. If they had not been posted, fewer students would have been caught cheating and received a zero. Having fewer failures is a better outcome than having more. So, he ought not to have posted the fake answers.

Others might identify the wrong as follows:

Cheating is wrong. If cheating is wrong, then facilitating cheating is wrong. He facilitated cheating.

Others might identify the wrong in another way:

You ought to avoid punishing people for any action A that they wouldn’t have done but for your intervention to entice them to do A. He posted the fake answers for the purpose of enticing students to use them. They wouldn’t have used those answers if he hadn’t posted them. He then punished students for using them.

My imagination could likely produce more examples. But I’ll stop now.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Thanks for the interesting ethical arguments, Sam. In the order in which you give them:

  1. “A consequentialist might [reply]: It was foreseeable that posting the fake answers increased the number of exam failures. If they had not been posted, fewer students would have been caught cheating and received a zero. Having fewer failures is a better outcome than having more. So, he ought not to have posted the fake answers.”

My response: It is not the case that having fewer failures is a better outcome than having none. I don’t know what could plausibly support that view.

2. “Others might identify the wrong as follows:
Cheating is wrong. If cheating is wrong, then facilitating cheating is wrong. He facilitated cheating.”

If by cheating you mean securing an unjustly high credential by duplicity, then he did not facilitate cheating. None of these students secured the credential. They failed the exam, and also exposed themselves as cheats. The bogus Quizlet helped them show their true colors so that they could be caught. Had the professor not posted it, some of those students might have kept searching and found a Quizlet with more plausible answers, which might have enabled them to pass. So it seems that the professor prevented cheating, rather than facilitating it.

3. “Others might identify the wrong in another way:
You ought to avoid punishing people for any action A that they wouldn’t have done but for your intervention to entice them to do A. He posted the fake answers for the purpose of enticing students to use them. They wouldn’t have used those answers if he hadn’t posted them. He then punished students for using them.

Even if we accept this principle, the ‘action A’ the students are being punished for is trying to cheat on the exam. And it seems clear that the students would have tried to cheat on the exam whether or not the professor had posted the Quizlet: they only found it because they were trying to cheat.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

“It is not the case that having fewer failures is a better outcome than having none. I don’t know what could plausibly support that view.”

Really? OK. There’s a lot that can plausibly support it. Among many other things: students passing helps them to achieve their goal of graduating, but failing doesn’t.

“the students are being punished for is trying to cheat on the exam”

Yes for cheating, but in specific for using those answers to attempt to earn credit. And no, they wouldn’t have done this if he hadn’t uploaded the fake answers.

“If by cheating you mean securing an unjustly high credential by duplicity, then he did not facilitate cheating.”

I don’t mean that. I mean using the fake answers to attempt to earn credit. That’s called “cheating.” And he facilitated it by uploading the fake answers.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Why would it be a good thing overall to help dishonest, unprepared students to obtain a credential that gives an incorrect impression of what they have achieved, devalues that same credential when it is earned by honest and well-repared students, and then enables these unprepared and dishonest people to obtain positions of greater power and responsibility?

The rest has already been answered in this thread.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

I’m no consequentialist, so I can’t answer on the basis of my own view. But the consequentialist view would be that the outcome in which we benefit more students contains more pleasure or happiness or well-being.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Right — more pleasure or happiness or well-being for everyone, not just the cheating students.

Kenny Easwaran
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Students learning enough to earnestly put sufficiently many correct answers on the test to pass is clearly better than students not learning enough to earnestly put sufficiently many correct answers on the test. But holding fixed the answers a student puts on a test, it’s not at all clear to me that passing the student is always better than failing them in its consequences.

If passing a student helps them get a job that they otherwise wouldn’t get, that might be helpful for the student (or it might not, if they are woefully underprepared) but it’s very unlikely to be helpful for the employer!

Conversely, if failing a student conveys to them that there will be negative consequences for not learning material in a course, this may help cause the student to later pay more attention to learning material in classes.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Kenny Easwaran
9 months ago

“If passing a student helps them get a job that they otherwise wouldn’t get, that might be helpful for the student (or it might not, if they are woefully underprepared) but it’s very unlikely to be helpful for the employer!”

“Very unlikely”? For some jobs, sure. For others, definitely not.

Anyway, I’m just helping JK to understand what others could be thinking.

Kenny Easwaran
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I’m not sure that this is a correct consequentialist analysis of the situation. If it were, then it seems that a professor would do something wrong any time they subtract enough points for incorrect answers that a student fails. I don’t believe that consequentialism is committed to the idea that professors should give passing grades to students whose work is incorrect enough to be given a failing grade on the basis of a pre-specified rubric, so it sounds to me like there must be some additional considerations that consequentialists are willing to accept, which might also be relevant to using this method to detect cheating and disincentivize it.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Kenny Easwaran
9 months ago

I tend to agree. JK asks what wrong was done. My main objective was to help JK understand what others *could* be thinking.

Prof L
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Seriously. ALL of those 40 students were TRYING to cheat. That, in itself, is enough reason for them to fail the course.

I generally try to pretend that cheating doesn’t happen in my classes, because it’s a major pain and frankly, I don’t care enough or get paid enough or have the time to deal with it. But I have nothing but admiration and moral appreciation for those who care enough about the integrity of their students to do something about it.

We’re passing and graduating a bunch of people who are fundamentally dishonest people, cheaters and liars who will take the easy way out of any situation. Nearly half of the students in this guy’s class were perusing quizlet, trying to cheat! That he caught them is a service, primarily to them. One hopes that they might become better people as a result.

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  Prof L
9 months ago

You are not remotely concerned that by allowing cheating you are promoting cheating and being paid to promote cheating as opposed to teaching? I think when we accuse students of being “fundamentally dishonest people, cheaters and liars” we need to also ask if any administrators, faculty or others may be “fundamentally dishonest people, cheaters and liars”.

David
David
Reply to  Former Prof
8 months ago

I teach in good faith, I design and assign assignments that reflect and reinforce the stuff I teach in good faith, and I *try* to evaluate student responses in good faith. I am NOT a cop.

In this age of ChatGPT we’re already at the point where a person with zero background in a topic can produce a passable response to just about any exam. The person you’re responding to is quite right that they aren’t given the time or resources to police “bad faith” students. It’s a huge crisis in education because assessing student learning just got really, really difficult. Don’t blame the underpaid instructor.

Unknownsailor
Unknownsailor
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

In the real world, do we want mechanical engineering students who cheated their way through university designing bridges where you either do the proper calculations or people die when the bridge collapses?

Universities already have poor reputations for being hotbeds of woke indoctrination. Allowing rampant cheating will shred what little confidence employers have left with the quality of the “product” universities produce.

Rob Dinsmore
Rob Dinsmore
Reply to  Unknownsailor
9 months ago

I want to point out that STEM majors are often swamped with coursework for their majors and don’t view classes that are required to satisfy the school’s general education requirements as something that is remotely as important as learning their trade. They are not cheating on statics, they are cheating on philosophy. It is still cheating, but it is on a topic that they will not retain much of any knowledge from when they are building bridges.

David
David
Reply to  Rob Dinsmore
8 months ago

STEM majors are just as likely to cheat their asses off if it stops them from failing a course. A desperate student is a desperate student.

The first fields to notice the effect of ChatGPT in the wild were STEM fields. Computer Science in particular.

Moti Gorin
9 months ago

This was a great idea, Garret. I have colleagues who have had to make many burdensome changes to their courses in response to sites like Quizlet. I don’t know what the solution to such sites is, but what you’ve done gives rise to an interesting possibility: if more people did what you did, i.e., uploading sham exams/quizzes with bad answers, it might be an effective way to undermine this form of cheating.

On the Market
9 months ago

I don’t think we are cops, nor that it is our job to teach compliance, discipline or anything else that clears a path for middle-managers who yearn for an obedient work force.

So I don’t think such interventions as in the OP are unethical per se, but they may reveal a misunderstanding about what it is that we do.

Hieronymus
Hieronymus
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

This “we aren’t cops” sentiment seems all over Twitter. Attempting to prevent cheating in the interests of student learning and fairness isn’t “being a cop” in any objectionable sense. What is it that we do that we should be unconcerned about cheating?

On the Market
Reply to  Hieronymus
9 months ago

Instead ask yourself why someone would be concerned about cheating?

If you’re very concerned about cheating, you’re probably using assignments that are easy to cheat on (eg anything that tests mainly for memorization).

If you base grades on measures that target understanding, engagement, and independent thought, you may just naturally be less concerned. Even if a student cheats part of the way, they’ll still be overall worse than any of the ones who followed along.

Maybe I’m a gooey romantic, but I still believe that cheaters mostly hurt themselves. Good course design makes this come out as true.

State School Prof
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Naive and condescending! How refreshing!

On the Market
Reply to  State School Prof
9 months ago

I understand that many people will be aghast at this, but they should ask whether they are so caught up in credentialing that they forgot about education.

David
David
Reply to  On the Market
8 months ago

That, unfortunately, sums up the approach of a lot of STUDENTS in higher ed. They’re in it for the credential, not the education. Thus shortcuts to the finish line are very, very attractive.

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

It’s true that cheaters mostly hurt themselves. But I don’t want them to be hurt! I want my students to learn! Perhaps that makes me the gooey romantic…

On the Market
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

I take a “you can only lead a horse to water” approach here.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

Punish them for their own good amirite.

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

The best option would be to threaten punishment but never follow through. Unfortunately I have yet to figure out how to put that into place. The second best is indeed to “punish them for their own good,” so to speak. The punishment is not good for them, but the framework in which they are expecting to be punished if caught is good for them, because it incentivizes doing the work and thus learning.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

Right — and threatening to cheat without being prepared to follow through only works once, unless your students will never even try it. That’s one of the main reasons why we need to follow through.

Hieronymus
Hieronymus
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

ChatGPT (and soon-to-be-here improved versions of the same sort of technology) seem to undermine the thought that “if you base grades on measures that target understanding, engagement and independent thought” you may be less concerned.

On the Market
Reply to  Hieronymus
9 months ago

Short-term I’m not worried, long-term maybe it’ll lead us to finally doing away with this dreadful institution of valuing people on a letter scale altogether.

Although I fear it’ll just lead to in-class exams in faraday-caged rooms.

Prof L
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Right, when I hand back graded assignments, I whisper “this is how I judge your value as a person” in each student’s ear …

Having standards is not the same as valuing people on the basis of how well their work meets those standards. Have you ever taught a course?

On The Market
Reply to  Prof L
9 months ago

Plenty. I find that kindness goes farther than duress, but I know not everyone sees it that way.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

I think it’s unreasonable to expect people with hundreds of students each semester to assume the burden of designing assignments that minimize any possibility of cheating. Doesn’t this too make cheating concerns too high a priority relative to other parts of the job?

Anyway, I agree that it’s naive to suppose good course design makes this come out as true. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I struggle with whether my learning assessments provide meaningful information to those worried about credentialing, or whether they even should. Identifying cheaters is paradoxically a simple and useful service: this is a person who will do X when explicitly told not to do X because it is dishonest and wrong. Maybe that’s a good thing for people to know about a prospective hire or professional student.

On the Market
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

I’m not talking about intricate cheat-proof assignments. You’re right that this also gives too much weight to cheating.

The priority is always education.

Don’t attempt to prevent cheating mechanically, but simply make it a non-issue.

The first step is to integrate assignments into learning so that students actually see a benefit in completing them.

Then, if the students work towards a goal that is not “an A in this course” and you can make it plausible that the assignments are part of the learning experience, then you’re 90% there. And if someone still cheats, I really don’t know why one should care.

That’s the course design part.

The last bit in the way is these dreadful grades. One wants an A to mean something, I guess. As you correctly note, it is not quite clear what we are certifying with an A to begin with. I’d be in favor of eliminating grades altogether.

I wrote more about this downthread; my vision is somewhat utopian but certainly not unattainable if we could come together as educators rather than credentialers.

Finally, I’m really, really not interested in whether I am providing actionable information to employers. I don’t let it sway anything about my teaching. I find it concerning how many people here take it to be part of their job to aid the pre-selection of applicants.

Last edited 9 months ago by On the Market
Grad Student
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Thank you for being the only person in this comment thread with a reasonable take on this issue.

Sam Duncan
9 months ago

There are two issues here that I think we should keep apart.
One is whether what he did in any way lessens the students’ culpability. I guess for me what helps here is to think about cases where I’d think police have entrapped someone or not. If someone was on the fence on making a bomb and went back and forth and the police subtly pushed him to do it or even assuaged his worries and doubts, then I’d say entrapment. I’d probably say entrapment if he was some sort of political radical and really wanted to do something violent and they just put the bomb idea in his head in some way. However, if he’d decided to make a bomb and was making steps to do it, but for some reason didn’t know where to get fertilizer and diesel and all the cops did was point him toward the nearest Southern States Co-Op then I’d say he hasn’t been entrapped and the decision is all on him. (I know that actual American law on entrapment is more permissive, but a. I disagree and b. I think a stricter standard helps).
The other thing is whether this is a lousy thing to do. I’m more on the fence here. On the one hand, trying to trip up or trick your students is far from the ideal relationship a prof should have with them. But on the other we don’t live in an ideal world and our actual practice has to adapt to that. Ultimately I don’t think I’d condemn him here either. I’ve went through my classes and gotten rid of all the paper and discussion board topics Chat GPT does well with. I’ve tried to keep only the ones where it fails miserably and have even tried to design new prompts that get it to say blatantly stupid stuff. Is that much different? I guess the difference here is that one could argue that the Chat GPT cheaters would use it no matter what and here the cheaters couldn’t and wouldn’t have cheated without the answers being up. But it seems question begging to assume that’s true. Why think they wouldn’t have tried to cheat in some other way?

toro toro
toro toro
9 months ago

The objections to this put me in mind of Trump and his supporters complaining that testifying under oath would be a “perjury trap”; it is, in precisely the same sense that a bank is a robbery trap, or a house a burglary trap.

To be negatively affected by what GM has done, students must first form the intention to cheat, and then act on it. All he has done is thwart the likelihood that they will succeed. I’m 100% in favour, and can only laugh at the idea that there’s anything ethically improper there.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  toro toro
9 months ago

I agree with the thrust of this. However, this isn’t true:

“All he has done is thwart the likelihood that they will succeed.”

It’s likely that he has invited some students to form the intention to cheat. Possibly, some students who went to Quizlet with the sole intention to study, but saw the exam with answers and, as a result, formed the intention to cheat.

Whether or not students did in fact do this, he did facilitate (and encourage?) cheating, and he thereby has done more than “thwart the likelihood that they will succeed.”

Dr. B
Dr. B
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

If students want to study for an exam, they should have notes and books and resources provided by the professor. The professor did not and could not “invite some students to form the intention to cheat.” He didn’t tell them to visit Quizlet. Academic dishonesty policies warn of the consequences of cheating, and they must be responsible for their choice to cheat or to be honest. One cannot claim to know a student’s intention for visiting Quizlet, but as Jack McCoy says, “intent follows the bullet.” They cheated; thus, they went to the site to cheat. It is an ethics class, so they failed to understand and apply the primary concept of the class. Cheating on an ethics exam is the definition of irony. At my college, I could have only given them an F on the exam, but I believe they should have failed the entire course, and I would have taken that argument to the Dean.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Dr. B
9 months ago

Suppose I know many students in my class are hungry but on a diet, and I put their favorite high-calorie foods on their route to my class. Beside it, there’s a sign that says “free to all.”

If I want my students to find the food and succumb to their urges (and form the intention) to eat it, I surely won’t need to ask them to go to class, for I know many will be going to class on that route already. What’s more, many won’t be taking the route to cheat on their diet, but might still take the route to get to class, find the food, and cheat. So, from the fact they cheated, it doesn’t follow that they took the route to cheat.

Something similar is true in the case at hand. All I’m saying is it’s possible (and somewhat likely) that some students were invited to form the intention to cheat on the exam as the students in the food example were invited to cheat on their diets. Further, I’m happy to grant that many or most were at the site to cheat.

Tim
Tim
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Suppose I know many students in my class are hungry but on a diet, and I put their favorite high-calorie foods on their route to my class.

It’s funny how every defense of cheating on this ethics exam begins with a wild analogy that bears little resemblance to reality.

Beside it, there’s a sign that says “free to all.”

So this hypothetical situation is in fact the exact opposite of the situation at hand. In reality, the professor said not to do this, the school’s honor code said not to do this, and even Quizlet’s terms of service say not to do this.

Something similar is true in the case at hand.

No, there was no party in the case at hand who ever claimed that this was acceptable.

You might have had a valid point to make (though I’m not sure what) if your story had a plate of food with 3 signs (from the professor, the school, and the caterer) which all said “DO NOT EAT DURING THE TEST”.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Tim
9 months ago

I’m obviously not defending cheating. Clearly I’m supporting the claims (1) from the fact that students who visited the site cheated, it doesn’t follow that the students visited the site to cheat, and (2) some students could’ve been invited to form the intention to cheat after arriving at the site, even if they weren’t told to go to the site. The example was designed simply to make that point, and it wasn’t intended to be highly analogous with the actual case of cheating.

Jean Kazez
Jean Kazez
9 months ago

The results are fascinating and amusing, but nah, this is a bad idea. Reason: we want grades to communicate information about what students learned, to the greatest extent possible. Granted, they also signify other things to a degree, like whether students are punctual, whether they attended, whether they cheated…but that should be kept within limits. When you make cheating easier and wind up with 40/96 getting low grades because they cheated, not based on low learning, you’re muddying the significance of grades more than necessary. After all, there are other ways to prevent cheating–so grades aren’t muddied in the opposite way (high grades going to people who cheated instead of learning something). You can tweak exams, change the order of answers, etc. The prof. has made detecting cheaters an end in itself, instead of treating it just as a means of achieving grade-learning proportionality.

Last edited 9 months ago by Jean
xapalatka
xapalatka
Reply to  Jean Kazez
9 months ago

If the answers were trivially wrong on the basis of the learning material then what was measured was precisely a low (more precisely, zero) level of learning (or a low level of text comprehension).

Jean Kazez
Jean Kazez
Reply to  xapalatka
9 months ago

The situation may have been mixed. Some may have found the answers at quizlet extremely surprising, but may have reasoned that they had to be correct, since answers at quizlet are always from answer keys, in their experience. “I can’t believe this is right, but it’s got to be, given what I know about quizlet, so I’ll choose this answer.” The propensity to go along with quizlet answers is a sure sign of dishonesty, but not a good measure of how much students understand.

MBW
MBW
9 months ago

Ooof, this is a fun one. Instructors have to be cops (we have to certify competence in the material) and guides (help them learn). But one can be too much one or the other! If there’s an ethical lapse here, I tend to see it as opting for the ‘cop’ role of the instructor when the ‘guide’ role would have sufficed and might have made them learn something. One could have taken down the Quizlet exam and announced to the class that it had been taken down, or pointed out how easy it would be for professor to upload a fake exam. Upload it in class for extra drama. And some of them might have taken the reminder and studied. It’s not entrapment, but it wasn’t the best choice, I think.

Instead, what you’ve got is a situation where you’ve arguably caught some (I’d want an actual data science person to look at your calculations, because if your bad answers are correlated at all then the odds are different), but you’re going to punish only those honest enough to confess. Anyone who keeps their mouth shut learns nothing but just fails the final — statistical proof isn’t going to hold up when the student appeals to the provost.

The bigger question is whether using previous exams counts as cheating. It apparently is against the honor code here, but absent that, I’m not sure it’s clear cut. It could be used ‘to cheat’, i.e., memorizing answers, but also to learn how the professor asks questions, to see what kinds of things are on the exam, etc., and it doesn’t feel different than watching YouTube videos, finding explainers, etc., which aren’t the Platonic form of coming to class and learning but also not usually characterized as cheating.

CLL
CLL
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

This case involves an online class, which poses particular challenges.
It isn’t just a matter of students “memorizing answers” or using outside materials and explainers to study. It’s a matter of students looking up answers while taking the test.

MBW
MBW
Reply to  CLL
9 months ago

If you give an online multiple-choice take-home exam with no way of enforcing the testing environment, the gods are going to give you cheating students.

CLL
CLL
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

I agree with this. Sadly, asynchronous online courses are here to stay. As an adjunct who was forced to become certified to teach online because of the pandemic, I will be stuck teaching a lot of them.

If you are in a position where you can avoid these courses, I’m genuinely happy for you (and your students – I am convinced online courses result in worse learning outcomes for most students, cheating issues aside). However, as a profession, we need to figure out a better response than throwing our hands up. Perhaps such a response doesn’t exist and we have already lost. Lately, I’ve come to suspect this is true, and I have started to question my willingness to continue teaching in such an environment.

The problem isn’t unique to multiple choice exams. Written assignments fare no better (I even have students plagiarize low stakes discussion posts).

Last edited 9 months ago by CLL
MBW
MBW
Reply to  CLL
9 months ago

I’m not able to avoid it (teaching online since 2012, I think), but I’m lucky that we have a testing center, so even asynchronous online classes can have an in-person proctored option for exams. I’m not sure there’s a good or obvious solution here.

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  CLL
9 months ago

My heart goes out to you. Many are coerced into teaching in a way that does not align with their values. I am glad you can see this and I genuinely hope you find a way to teach that you believe in. Best of luck!

Ecpyrosis
Ecpyrosis
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

An example of cheating is violating the rules governing an exam in order to pass it, and as Merriam said it is against school policy (and class policy as his syllabus affirmed school policy) to use previous tests without permission from the professor. So this was cheating. There are other questions we could ask, like “should we have a different rule” of course.

nikos
9 months ago

Is anyone thinking of Eric Schwitzgebel’s study on ethics books? Schwitzgebel gave compelling evidence that people studying ethics are more likely to steal books from the university library!

His study, and this situation with the ethics course, seem symptomatic of philosophy in general these days, and it perhaps gives us a little openness to Thoreau’s suggestion that, in some ways, “there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” The work of Hadot and others shows that the practice of philosophy in the universities is anemic, and it seems symptomatic that this whole issue has come up in relation to an ethics course in particular.

Doesn’t this indicate how much of a change we need in how we teach LoveWisdom? Doesn’t this indicate how much has gone wrong in education at all levels? Are we corrupting souls? If the souls of our youth come to us already in distress, do we have any idea how to facilitate healing?

The ecologies learning we find in most universities make it exceptionally challenging to teach in ways that would keep students engaged, and empower the possibility for transformative insight. It seems far more important for us as philosophers to look at ourselves and the larger systems than to place blame on these students. This cheating behavior is feedback, not something we can see as a deep violation on the part of the students (thus, I disagree that the instructor should have turned the students in . . . this should have been very personal feedback, and perhaps a kind of wake-up call). We seem to need more systems thinking here.

Gregory Bateson wrote about this in relation to crime:

“It is interesting to consider the nature of such a concept as “crime.” We act as if crime could be extinguished by punishing parts of what we regard as criminal actions, as if “crime” were the name of a sort of action or of part of a sort of action. More correctly “crime,” like “exploration,” is the name of a way of organizing actions. It is therefore unlikely that punishing the act will extinguish the crime. In several thousand years, the so-called science of criminology has not escaped from a simple blunder in logical typing.”

For many students, “cheating” refers to their manner of organizing learning. It is up to philosophers to change that. We have here feedback on the state of philosophy, not feedback about actions taken by a group of isolated individuals.

How can philosophers design courses to help their students become more ethical beings? It won’t happen by means of the kinds of gestures philosophers in the academy are used to making.

We find a deep cultural issue here, because many (if not most) of the people doing the most serious harms on a planetary scale could likely have passed this ethics exam without resorting to “cheating”. What does that tell us?

I don’t expect all philosophers in the university to teach in ways that might have the most positive impact on this situation. But this does seem to give further evidence to the need for a more diverse ecology—not merely diverse in terms of skin color, gender, or cultural background, but diverse in the forms of life and forms of discourse we associate with philosophy.

Philosophy as a way of life needs more presence in the academy and in the culture. If we treat philosophy too anemically or abstractly, then learning it and living it become incapable of actually helping us fulfill our greatest potential and cultivate the whole of life onward.

At the very least, we should all sit long and hard with the nature of philosophy, the nature of education, and the nature of the teaching and learning of LoveWisdom. Socrates would want us all to ask: “What are you? And what will these students become if they come and study with you?”

Hector
9 months ago

We are educators and credentialers. I have always hated being the latter, and it looks like technology is inevitably going to make credentialing impossible to do meaningfully anyway. The consumers of the credentials I contribute to — grad schools and employers, mainly — are no doubt already wise to this, and that fact makes me less concerned about the meaningfulness of my contribution to credentialing.
I am more bothered by, and completely unsure how to address, the fact that we have gamified education by situating it as a requirement for credentials.

On the Market
Reply to  Hector
9 months ago

You put it much better than I did.

MBW
MBW
9 months ago

Another thing to consider: at the K-12 level, students are sometimes encouraged to use Quizlet and other test banks as study guides. Explicitly, by the teachers. They also encourage collaboration in Google Docs, etc. So unless your institution hits the honor code hard, you’re going to have a population of students who thinks that using quizlet counts as ‘studying’, not cheating, and is going to be completely floored by what feels to them like a massive change of rules.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

Some of the students I have confronted did say they used it for studying, not during the test itself. The problem with that is (a) there is no way to tell if that’s true, or if they’re just trying to mitigate their culpability. If it was just one student I might trust my judgement, but with 40, it’s not possible. And (b) even if it was a good faith mistake, that still qualifies as cheating according to our academic integrity policy, which they are required to know.

MBW
MBW
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

That’s what I would expect from at least some of them. I would be inclined to think that it’s true — and probably sufficient for your purposes in this case, given the academic integrity policy.

Noah
Noah
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

There’s an argument to be made that the students did not violate the policy you described, as uploading a version of the test yourself constitutes permission from the instructor.

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Noah
9 months ago

For an amusing examination of actual permission to cheat, check our Roy Sorensen’s article “Permission to Cheat.”

Noah
Noah
Reply to  Daniel Weltman
9 months ago

I specifically meant the permission to “look at other exams” that is referenced in the OP as being required under the school policy. Not an outright permission to cheat.

Euro
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

In Sweden students have a constitutional right to gain access to old exams. The old exams are considered a “public document” and the right to gain access to public documents are protected under “the principle of publicity”. Universities are under obligation to archive all old exams under some paragraph in “the freedom of the press”, as long as there is no specfic security risks attached to the documents. Old exams will circulate among the students. These are anonymised, but both the exam and answers are readily available. Studying by looking at old exams is part of what is considered to be “studying for an exam”, and teachers often link to old exams in their communication with the students. I even remember a few classes in undergrad where the exam questions were identical to the old exams.

Obviously, multiple choice exams are rarely used. This puts greater demands on teachers, as multiple choice is faster to grade, but it would completely eliminate “cheating by looking at old exams”.

I’m surprised that noone has suggested the apparent solution: if looking at old exams are bad because it is unfair to the ones that has not looked at old exams, make everyone look at the old exams. Exams should be designed in such a way that old exams can be used as a study tool.

Perhaps this is a Scandinavian sentiment, but if almost half of your students are cheating on your exam, the solution is not to reprimand the students, but to redesign your exams! Your designs are obviously flawed. I would consider ditching multiple choice exams.

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  Euro
9 months ago

I made old exams available and also created “no stakes” online practice tests aligned with my exams. When the cheating became rampant (more than half the class) only a handful of students would even look at the practice tests-usually the ringers that would be providing the answers during the exams. The format of exams included multiple choice, multiple response, short answer and essay with choice, usually 4 or more formats for a class of 25 with different questions and jumbled on paper, in person. My Pockethound proved helpful in detecting GSM used, no cell phones visible. The only solution is to punish cheaters. There is no “magical method” that promotes learning. They often buy their grade before they even enroll. I recommend The Cheat Sheet substack if you need to learn more.

Rando
9 months ago

A number of the responses here contend that at least some of the wrongness of Prof. Merriam’s action comes from creating an opportunity for students to cheat by uploading a bogus test to Quizlet. This overlooks the fact that the professor not only uploaded a bogus test, but also removed an actual test. Since the opportunity to access what purports to be a test is the same both before his actions and after, it does not seem like Prof. Merriam made it any more likely that students would cheat.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Rando
9 months ago

In removing the actual test answers from Quizlet and replacing them with bogus test answers he didn’t make it more likely that students would cheat, but you’re ignoring the fact that he had a third option: removing the actual test answers from Quizlet and not replacing it with anything. Had he done this, there would have likely been fewer cheaters. So, he didn’t do all he could to minimize cheating. Indeed, he chose not to minimize cheating so that he could identify and punish more of those who are willing to cheat in the circumstances in which the answers to the test seem to be readily available on Quizlet.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

There would have been fewer ‘successful’ cheaters. The attempted cheaters would have remained the same. The same number of students would have went looking for a short cut, regardless of whether or not they found one.

And there was no deliberate attempt on my part to allow cheaters so I could catch them. I specifically warn my students against cheating, I link them to the academic integrity policy, which they are required to know (albeit I did not specifically mention that such websites are prohibited in my syllabus, something I will do next time), and I give them flexibility around deadlines if they need more time. I also give them a comprehensive study guide, so there’s no reason they should have to go looking for outside help.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

Is searching online for information relevant to answering the test questions cheating? (I’m genuinely asking. I don’t know what rules you’ve established. I know that you say there’s no reason for them to do so, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t do it anyway.) If not, then some people may have come across the bogus test answers that you put up on Quizlet through a search without having had the intention of cheating. I think that we should try to minimize the number of people who actually cheat by both disincentivizing cheating and making it as difficult as possible for those who wish or attempt to cheat to succeed. So consider that you have a way of monitoring students during an in-person exam that enables you to detect discretely from the front of the room whether any exam-takers are looking at illicit crib sheets during the exam. You could just not tell them about this so that those who brought in crib sheets with the intention of cheating if it looks like they can get away with it will all cheat and get caught and be punished. Or you could instead (with the help of a TA) demonstrate to them that they will not be able to refer to a crib sheet without getting caught. In which case, none of those who brought in a crib sheet will now use it to cheat. The difference between you and myself, I suspect, is that you think the former is better, but I think that the latter is better. It’s better to prevent those who are willing and prepared to do wrong from doing wrong than it is to identify and punish those who are. We should be more concerned with preventing wrong-doing (and additional wrong-doing — if just making a crib sheet counts as wrong-doing) then we are with identifying and punishing those what are willing to do wrong (other things being equal).

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

Interesting, Doug! And maybe a little surprising coming from a consequentialist: how would you defend that view on consequentialist grounds?

Seems that only the former method comes with lasting consequences: the students are negatively conditioned to not cheat in the future and so would be more inclined to put in the work going forward. That’s what we want from our future doctors, politicians, engineers, teachers, etc. — having competent citizens makes our world a lot better.

The latter method might better prevent cheating on that one exam day, but it’s not obvious how it deters future cheating and promotes a habit of academic honesty (beyond your class) toward the goal of competency.

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

Not surprising! Consequentialism is compatible with almost any view about which acts are right and wrong. Thus, the consequentialist and non-consequentialist can agree that an act is wrong. But they’ll disagree about what makes that act wrong: say, whether it’s that its outcome is outranked by that of an available alternative or that it’s forbidden by God. And an act’s outcome should be construed broadly to include not just its causal effects but everything that would be the case were the act to be performed.

In any case, it is also not obvious that the latter method wouldn’t better prevent cheating overall. In any case, though, I don’t see it as part of my job to identify and then punish those willing to do wrong even if it is, in part, to identify and punish those who have done wrong. And I do think that I should try to prevent those who are willing to do wrong from actually doing wrong.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Douglas W. Portmore
9 months ago

Oh, I’m not surprised that consequentialism can defend any given act, as long as the math or circumstances work out. It’s just (much) less obvious to me that the latter method would better prevent cheating overall, and I was wondering why you think it would.

I’m sure you can come up with an imaginative explanation, but I suspect it’d take some contorting, and that the more natural conclusion is that the former method would more likely lead to better outcomes, since rationale people respond to incentives and deterrents…

Douglas W. Portmore
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

It doesn’t have to do with the math or the circumstances. It could be that the outcome in which one makes it easier for others to cheat by putting bogus test questions online is outranked by the outcome in which one refrains from doing so irrespective of whether this maximizes utility or minimizes bad instances of cheating overall. Thus, it has to do with accepting an evaluator-relative ranking of outcomes in which an agent-neutrally worse outcome can, for the agent’s evaluative standpoint, outrank an agent-neutrally better outcome.

Patrick Lin
9 months ago

Not unethical. It does seem to be a honeypot, but it’s not entrapment because the honeypot was placed in an area that students should not have been in the first place, and we may presume that any student there is looking to cheat.

It’s not like Garret left a fake copy of the exam on a public copy machine or in a hallway, where an otherwise innocent student would stumble upon it and only then be tempted to cheat. It’s more like a bank marking the money (or placing exploding dye packets) in its vault; does the bank really have a moral obligation to alert bank robbers in advance that they’ve marked the money, esp. when the robbers shouldn’t be in the vault in the first place? Ok, maybe alerting them would be a deterrent of sorts, but it also telegraphs your defenses and allows them to plan around it. At best, alerting would-be robbers or would-be cheaters seem supererogatory.

In Garret’s case, uploading an actual test with wrong answers still provides the student with the live/real test questions in advance, i.e., it’s an opportunity for the student to look critically at the questions and legitimately answer them correctly on their own. They still could have done the right thing, even at that point. But they didn’t choose that path (to the extent we choose anything.)

Anyway, in ethical or white-hat hacking, honeypots are the norm and generally not considered wrong, at least when placed in areas of a network where access is supposed to be denied. So, yes, it’s a honeypot, but that’s fine.

My main concern with this strategy is that Garret just created a ton of paperwork for himself, as well as bad-will among some of his students. I would’ve focused more on prevention upstream rather than prosecution downstream. But I like the commitment to rooting out cheaters.

#TeamGarret

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

“we may presume that any student there is looking to cheat.”

This is a mistake. Some students seem to be unaware that the site is used to cheat, but belive it to be good for studying. Genuinely interested and academically committed students have informed me that they use it to study. Not to mention that it does appear to be a source of study material, rather than a cheating site.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

“Some students seem to be unaware that the site is used to cheat, but belive it to be good for studying.”

I’d want to see the receipts for that claim. And even if some small fraction of Quizlet’s users (at the college level) are that naïve, that doesn’t mean we can’t reasonably presume a student there is looking to cheat.

It reminds me of the good-old days of Napster, which was nominally a P2P file-sharing site and not an music piracy site. Maybe some folks have used Napster in an unproblematic way that doesn’t violate anyone’s IP, but that’s not how the vast majority of folks use it.

Same with essay mills that supposedly are only meant to give you “inspiration” for you to write your own essays, or interacting with ChatGPT for “ideas” or as a study aid but not for copy-and-paste AI plagiarism. Again, maybe some folks do use those services unproblematically, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm.

Ultimately, this may be an empirical question that we can’t answer here without actual data.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

If it’s an empirical question the charitable presumption is not that students are there to cheat but there to learn. Or are they guilty until proven innocent?

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

Well, I don’t have any hard data about Napster users either, just a lot of anecdotes, but I’m comfortable presuming that the average Napster user was just trying to get free music and circumvent IP licensing and other fees. Of course, that’s not enough in a court of law, but we’re not in a court of law here; we’re just talking about what’s reasonable to assume.

And given Garret’s experiment, he has shown (and extracted confessions) that many of his students did in fact cheat via Quizlet, and I’m willing to bet most or all of them also knew that Quizlet enables cheating, which is why they were there in the first place. If otherwise-honest students were merely looking for a study aid on the site, and they found what appears to be an actual exam but with obviously wrong answers, I’d reasonably expect those students would recognize the obviously wrong answers or at least try to figure out why the exam showed they were correct answers (which it can be reasonably presumed they didn’t do, since obviously wrong answers aren’t defensible upon reflection or study).

Anyway, if students aren’t penalized without a confession, that might avoid the (fair) point you’re raising about presuming guilt. For the record, I don’t make formal accusations of academic dishonesty without a confession, which is usually pretty easy to get…

MBW
MBW
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

According to friends with teenagers, it’s common to turn study guides into quizzes and upload them to Quizlet; to use it to study for AP exams; and they’re often directed to do so by teachers, who treat it as a database of practice tests.

There’s some evidence that their initial encounter with Quizlet is that it’s not cheating to use it and that it’s sanctioned. It’s possible some students thought their classmates had turned his study guide into a quiz and then “learned” the wrong answers he uploaded.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

So, the idea is that some students went to Quizlet to look for a study aid, found the exam, and memorized the “correct” answers, which they reproduced in the actual exam? That doesn’t sound like studying at all, which makes me skeptical of the alleged intention of looking for a study aid in the first place.

Rather, how a fake exam might be used as a study aid is: a student finds the exam, is extremely puzzled by what’s presented as correct answers, and tries to figure out what went wrong with their own reasoning. If the answers were obviously wrong, or with any subsequent discussion with the instructor, a good student (who’s merely looking for a study aid) would realize that the Quizlet exam was not to be trusted.

MBW
MBW
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

So, yes, basically. Think of it in another common context: student uses last year’s chemistry or calculus exam to prep for the final then goes in and takes the presumably new-to-them final (in person), and it turns out a couple of the practice questions were reused. I think the student would describe themselves as having studied and gotten really lucky that some of the questions were on the exam. This is pretty common (and often recommended.). Apparently sometimes students turn study guides into quizzes – the equivalent of sharing flash cards.

We have a similar situation here – except the practice test is full of fake answers and it’s not clear the test environment was controlled at all.

I think it’s reasonable for some students – maybe not at this institution from what’s been said about the honor code but I don’t know how it’s treated there – to be completely confused. They didn’t steal the real test. They studied by taking what they thought was a practice test that luckily overlapped with the real test, and then got busted for cheating.

I think maybe a good and confident student would realize the test was bad not that they were wrong. But how many of those do we have? How many would say that they thought they were right but the practice test convinced them they must not have understood the material when it showed them the wrong answers? How ‘obvious’ are the wrong answers? Are we talking cartoonishly obvious or what a professor thinks is obvious? (Not the same!)

I guess my worry is that some used the Quizlet as a study guide and got worse because of the sting. No doubt some cheated, but I’m not confident that this method identifies them.

Grad Student
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

Quizlet is in fact a study resource. It is simply a platform that allows users to generate flashcards and test themselves on flashcard decks. Some users may generate flashcards on the basis of stolen exam materials that ought not to have been uploaded to the internet. This does not make Quizlet a cheating site. It is a study resource.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

If you’re a grad student, it’s possible you’re not familiar with my earlier comparison to Napster, which peaked in popularity in early 2001.

It was billed as a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing site, and its own policies vehemently denied it should be used to illegally download music, which is what the vast majority of users did, even if some users used it innocently. Here’s what their IP policy said back then:

Napster Copyright Policy

Napster is an integrated browser and communications system provided by Napster, Inc., to enable musicians and music fans to locate bands and music available in the MP3 music format. The MP3 files that you locate using Napster are not stored on Napster’s servers. Napster does not, and cannot, control what content is available to you using the Napster browser. Napster users decide what content to make available to others using the Napster browser, and what content to download. Users are responsible for complying with all applicable federal and state laws applicable to such content, including copyright laws.

Napster respects copyright law and expects our users to do the same. Unauthorized copying, distribution, modification, public display, or public performance of copyrighted works is an infringement of the copyright holders’ rights. You should be aware that some MP3 files may have been created or distributed without copyright owner authorization. As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others. In addition, Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service, or if Napster believes that user conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster, its affiliates, or other users, or for any other reason in Napster’s sole discretion, with or without cause.

If you know anything about Napster, you already know this is laughable. Just because a site posts such a disclaimer means very little or nothing toward the question of whether it’s a legitimate site and not meant to enable crimes or cheating. You can probably find similar “policies” in pirate sites today, as well as dark-web sites that primarily promote illegal or grey-zone activities, from prostitution to contraband to weapons.

P.S. Back in the day, music companies and artists also uploaded fake files of songs to Napster to combat IP theft. Those fake songs ended up to just be noise and wasted the user’s time and storage space in downloading it, which disincentivized dipping back into the Napster well in the future. Would you say that strategy was unethical, too? (Some fake files contained malware, and that’s a different scenario and discussion.)

Back to Quizlet: again, it seems to be an empirical question of whether the site is mainly used by wanna-be cheaters or not. Maybe it’s reasonable/very charitable for you to assume innocence unless proven otherwise; but I think I and others have seen enough to also reasonably conclude that it caters to cheaters primarily or at least way too much to be considered an innocent “study resource”…

Source of the above quote: https://web.archive.org/web/20010206225422/http://www.napster.com/terms/

Grad Student
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Many in these comments allege that students falsely believe that Quizlet is a study resource, rather than a cheating site. The implication is that Quizlet is in fact a cheating site, not a study resource. This is false. Quizlet is a study resource. While some students may use it to cheat, by relying on resources that ought not to have been uploaded, the site is explicitly designed to be a study tool.

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

delete

Last edited 9 months ago by Moti Gorin
Laura
Laura
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

Why does it matter if they’re explicitly told not to use online sources when answering the exam questions? The briefest perusal of the site indicates students can post their own poor quality notes. I don’t want anyone looking at this as a source, regardless of cheating, but because it doesn’t help anyone learn.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

At the very least, it’s a tool for avoiding learning how to do philosophy.

BenK
9 months ago

While I sympathize with the impulse to redesign the exam (honestly, the point of philosophy is to construct your own argument, or at least explain why you agree with someone else’s. Multiple choice is missing the point!), I don’t see how this prof did anything wrong. Charges of “entrapment” are absurd: he didn’t send out emails saying “Hey, you want the answers to this exam???” He didn’t force anyone to go to the website he posted his wrong answers on. The responsibility is on the students who not only didn’t feel like studying, but obviously didn’t bother to learn anything in this class in the first place! I understand philosophy is hard and universities are fast becoming diploma mills stamping out good little white collar workers, so the incentive to cheat is there, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. “Poisoning the well” is the wrong analogy entirely – what he did, rather, was put a tracer compound in the cookie jar and then watch to see who’d stolen from it. Like a bank putting a dye bomb in a sack of dollar bills before handing it to the robbers. The cheaters don’t deserve your sympathy, they deserve their Fs.

Stewie
9 months ago

I don’t think Professor Merriam is unethical. But I think he had a non-realistic expectation about human beings’ rational capacity to act purely “out of moral duty”, i.e., to follow the academic honesty policy just because they are told that they have the duty to do so.

Descriptively, human moral psychology simply doesn’t work like that.Normatively, that is just too demanding a requirement (maybe it’s not demanding for some, e.g., Immanuel Kant, but not everyone is Kant).I really wasn’t surprised that so many students cheated in this experiment done by Professor Merriam. Instead of expecting students to follow the policy just because it is “the right thing to do”, I agree with Justin that it is more useful to consider “feasible cheat-deterring strategies for professors teaching large classes”.

If the instructor wants reduce the chance of cheating, the very first thing they want to avoid is reuse exams or use questions to which students can easily find answers online. To be clear, I think it is always morally wrong to cheat! My point is that there are things we can do to help students avoid doing wrong other than expecting them to magically become a Kantian.

Last edited 9 months ago by Stewie
Garret Merriam
Reply to  Stewie
9 months ago

It just isn’t practical to write completely new exams every semester. It is very time consuming, and there is only so many ways you can rephrase questions about what Kant would say about the murderer at the door, or what Mill would say about telling a white lie. I agree that prevention is better than punishment, but ‘just write new tests’ is not a viable strategy.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Stewie
9 months ago

Imagine a neighborhood in which a few small bands of hoodlums go around preying on innocent people. They jump them, beat them up and otherwise assault them, and strip them of anything of value, leaving them for dead. Little is done to stop them, so their behavior continues.

Finally, a new police chief sets up an operation to stop it. He sends in some people who look like easy prey but can defend themselves. The instant the hoodlums attack, the police jump out and arrest the perpetrators. After a few days of this, all the hoodlum gangs are in jail.

Now the big trial comes. The hoodlums’ attorney argues that the police operation was a bad one because it’s just human nature to assault seemingly defenseless people on the street, and because the police operation ignored this and ‘enabled an assault’ (even though, obviously, what it enabled was an attempt at assault the police knew would be unsuccessful), and because it demands too much of people to expect them to allow innocent people to go their way in peace.

I hope almost anyone can see that all these things are preposterous. We are not helpless to stop ourselves from doing terrible things like assault innocent people and cheat on exams. Most people manage to restrain themselves.

What does enable cheating and immorality is a de facto policy of letting evildoers off the hook over and over again. When bad behaviors are known to be cost-free, more people are tempted to engage in them, and they come to feel more normal. The longer that goes on, the more work needs to be done to clean up the mess.

It’s really amazing to me that any of this is not obvious to all.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

The following is obvious:

  1. You’re assuming the cheaters in this case all have a history of cheating and you’re equating them with “violent hooligans” who leave their prey for dead.
  2. You’re writing as if the *only* thing that enables cheating is letting “evildoers” off the hook…. evil ??
  3. In other words, you’re assuming what you’re trying to prove.
  4. You’re ignoring the context and details of the class structure, dynamics, and culture.
  5. You’re reducing what may be a complex situation into a black-and-white “good” vs “evil” scenario.
  6. You’re arrogantly holding up your own arguments and opinions by expressing disbelief that others do not see the “obviousness” of the situation as you yourself see it.
BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

(posted twice, oops)

Last edited 9 months ago by BigProfGuy
Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Things not being obvious is one reason many of us went into philosophy.

Martin Shuster
9 months ago

The problem here–I’ll leave it to readers to decide exactly what kind of problem it is–is that Quizlet is not exclusively a website for cheating. It is a website for studying. Students can create and take quizzes on it for practice. The analogy is to purchasing, say, a book for taking a practice LSAT or GRE exam. Plenty of students use it in this way, whether to solidify their knowledge in an area *or* to begin to develop such knowledge.

What the professor did was to upload a quiz to it that (knowingly) had wrong answers on it. The professor thereby participated in the spread of misinformation. We have no idea what sort of effects that may have (had?) beyond the effects the professor has diagnosed in his class. The misinformation may be limited to his class, or it may have spread to others. It may or may not have effects in the future, depending on the nature of the knowledge. There’s no way to know. Such spreading of misinformation is a problem, even if the intention was not explicitly to do this.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  Martin Shuster
9 months ago

Quizlet tracks how many people visit the page in a given window of time. As far as I can tell, no one visited the final between December and the start of the month. During finals week the visits spiked. I don’t think I’m misleading the general public here.

As for my students, while it wasn’t my intention, a positive side effect here might be that they learn not to trust just anything that the find on the internet.

Larry
Larry
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

But does this constitute cheating? It’s very unclear to me why believing misinformation on the internet is a form of cheating.

Sure, if you had uploaded a PDF of the fake exam, with all the same identifiers as your actual exam I think there would be a good argument as to saying that a person with that PDF was violating academic integrity, however in this case a student could easily have misread the title of the flashcards or simply have assumed that it was just a typo. I don’t think any reasonable student would believe that someone had uploaded a copy of an actual upcoming exam to the internet on Quizlet out of all places. If I had come across such a think I would’ve just assumed that the uploader had written the wrong year by accident.

Of course, it would be copyright infringement for a student to have uploaded or accessed such document, but that is generally outside the purview of academic integrity.

At the end of the day I don’t think what was done here was unethical, but I also do not see why this constitutes any kind of academic integrity violation.

Recent Grad
Recent Grad
Reply to  Martin Shuster
9 months ago

I changed fields a few years ago late into a philosophy PhD. I used Quizlet for bio and chem courses and it was an amazing resource. You can make arbitrarily complex flash cards and study them using their mastery tracker, which automatically detects those concepts you need to study more and those you need to study less, etc. I would recommend responsible use of Quizlet to any college student.

The only thing is that Quizlet really pushes you to make your flash cards public and even link them with a university name and course number. It recommends public flash cards/study materials based on what you are studying. It is very unfortunate, for the reasons in this thread, but also because studying someone else’s materials is often unhelpful and potentially misleading if the material is taught in different ways.

From my experience on Quizlet, I could imagine a situation where someone was trying to study questions from the course and was recommended this/portions of this study guide, especially if they linked their studying to the course and others made flash cards from the exam. If your students are using Quizlet, make sure to recommend that they do so “offline” in the website’s private modes.

Double A
Reply to  Martin Shuster
9 months ago

It’s not the same as a practice LSAT book bc that book has the real answers. If students were really looking at this quizlet material as student produced study materials, then they would take seriously the possibility that the students that produced it didn’t understand the material. Students make mistakes. And if they thought like that, they would have realized that the obviously wrong answers were wrong and not copied them into their exam. But they didn’t approach it as a student produced study guide— they approached it as a list of answers to an exam that they mindlessly copied. Which is to say they cheated.

ZeusBoanerges
9 months ago

As misanthropic as I am, I don’t think that 40/96 kids in a class are intentional cheats. Even if they are, that indicates more a ‘systemic’ problem than a personal vice. They should not be punished.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  ZeusBoanerges
9 months ago

It is a systemic problem at this point. And the main reason the system creates these problems is because professors and administrators lost the will to punish.

On the Market
9 months ago

Many of you don’t want to, but you really should be asking yourself whether an institution (grading and examination) is worth saving if saving it requires escalating levels of surveillance and ever harsher, authoritarian methods.

Meme
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

“Many of you don’t want to, but you really should be…”.

The suggestion to reconsider institutional flaws is a good one, and worth taking seriously. Why include the distracting and patronizing language of a Twitter hot take?

(But I guess y’all aren’t ready for that question yet!)

Justin Kalef
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Yes. If you don’t like it, there are many easier careers to break into that don’t require that of us..

Gordon
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

You can also try to start the long difficult process of reforming the system. We have been working in the wrong direction the last 30 years or more, the capitalist model has infiltrated education so that grades are just as alienating as wages –as in both cases, the alienation derives from a means-ends view of education. Grades are supposed to evaluate the quality of a students work, to give them feedback. But the best feedback of course is comments on papers. a grade of C might just leave a student befuddled. But it is the entire culture that is corrupted in this way, not just the university. In the. last 50 years university administrators have been catching up with General Motors (or gone beyond them, insofar as they are not unionized.

This is a big utopian dream, but here is one thing that may help, if anything can. Incorporate discussion of student’s experience of education and the quasi marxist critique, thought it is also on a good Burkean could defend (I think.. not an expert). I found that students are quite open about the pressures they feel to get that A, about how secondary school teachers encourage focus on the result–grade.. rather than actual understanding or learning. Or more charitably, falsely believe that by focusing on the reward, more real learning will occur. It is not that this never works, it is very effective esp in getting people do necessary but tedious work (Think of all the painful memorization that is required to start learning a language).

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Gordon
9 months ago

Thanks for the response, Gordon. I think this thread is pretty well done, so I’ll just say here that I agree with you on some of the points about students’ attitudes toward university being a poor motivator and introducing perverse incentives, but reject the Marxist presumptions that seem to motivate your analysis.

I’m in favor of reforming the system, but in a different way, I think. I also haven’t seen much attention given to what seems to me to be a central consequence of much of this: if we simply give up on giving students grades that others can trust, then it’s hard to see why we won’t immediately put the majority of academics out of work. (Maybe you think it would be worth it, but I think that would be the consequence).

I’m not much inclined to continue the discussion in this thread, but it might be a relevant line of inquiry in response to an article I intend to write for Daily Nous quite soon. I’ve promised myself that I’ll get a little more done on my own work before I do that, but it should be here within a few weeks, all going well. Take care until then.

Nick
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

The university institution doesn’t *require* escalating levels of surveillance; these levels remained pretty steady throughout the 20th century. The instutition requires that escalation in the context of the takeover of our social world by Big Tech. Your position amounts to ignoring that world-historical contextual shift, isolating it from all critique here, and trying to pin all of this on universities, as though this escalation requirement were somehow baked into the institution as such. It isn’t. The internet has taken over the world. That’s what happened here. The rest of us are just trying to deal. That’s the whole story.

On The Market
Reply to  Nick
9 months ago

I didn’t say anything about the university, I spoke specifically of examination and grading (and, in a wider sense, perhaps of credentialing).

Due to technological development, our practices of examination and grading are, as they say in the military, OBE — overtaken by events.

We can “deal” with this, as you put it, by increasing surveillance: only do in-person exams, institute enhanced measures to prevent internet access, enhance these measures further as devices shrink, AIs do not require internet access anymore, etc. until we are (I’m confabulating) in a situation where examination halls have airport-style body scanners and individual Faraday cages with 360 degree camera surveillance.

I first got confronted with this in 2021 when my then-home university procured a veritable panopticum of “proctoring software” that absolutely nobody should be forced to put on their personal devices. I refused to use it.

Or we can seriously think about whether our old ways are worth clinging to, if this is what it takes to “deal” with the real world changes.

This aside, there’s many more reasons to question examination, grading, and credentialing. The anxiety it causes students. The adversarial relationship between professor and student. People getting their egos tied up in “not being fooled”. All this just ultimately hurts educational attainment.

Ecpyrosis
Ecpyrosis
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

In your last paragraph you gesture at some disvalues to examinations, grading, and credentialing. Genuine question: do you also see values in examinations (seeing if someone learned the material presented to them); grading (delineations of who did better than whom at a given task); or credentials (difficult-to-fake assurances that someone is able to do a suite of tasks well)? Or do you think these were all started for bad/misguided reasons and are being maintained for mere inertia?

On The Market
Reply to  Ecpyrosis
9 months ago

I think there’s merit to the things you list; a good example would be the various existing licensing exams that confer certifications that someone is able to do a certain task safely and properly.

I also think the social and practical benefits of such exams are significant enough to permit fairly draconian surveillance to ensure the efficacy of the exam.

But I think it is a mistake to enmesh examination with education, have educators be examinators, treat university degrees as certifications of practical ability etc.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

So, then: you think that it’s worth deterring cheating on a licencing exam, because society has an interest in ensuring that people who drive cars, perform surgery, build bridges, etc. do it competently enough not to cause a risk to other people.

But you don’t feel the same way about philosophy, even though you are apparently on the market to become a teacher of philosophy.

Why not? Do you think that the ability to reason things through and the habit of being intellectually modest, etc., have no effect on the well-being of others or the preservation or improvement of society?

It’s remarkable to me that so many people who are paid to teach philosophy repeatedly proclaim, in public, things that imply that there is no benefit to the work they do.

On the Market
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Hey Justin, it’s been a minute. Glad to see we’re still speaking different languages.

First, just to be clear, I’m on the market to be a tenured teacher of philosophy. I’ve been an untenured teacher of philosophy for a while now. I quite like it, I think I’m good at it, and I believe in what I do. Please don’t condescend to me.

Second, I think it is immensely important that people have “the ability to reason things through and the habit of being intellectually modest, etc.”. That’s why I’m favoring the primacy of education over possibly-hurting-education credentialing.

However, I’m not sold on a “ability to think things through” license. I wouldn’t even know what that’d be for. It is practically important that, say, an architect has the skills to build safe houses. Hence we only let people be architects who demonstrate these skills.

I don’t think it is important that … what? … only people with the philosophy license are engaged in thinking things through? That’d be wrong, in fact.

Conversely, due to the ubiquity of people who want to think things through, as many people as possible should receive education in philosophy.

I could be okay with a licensing exam for philosophy, if there’s a need. Perhaps that’ need is just teachers and perhaps the PhD is just that exam. But I don’t think that this is best achieved through constant examination pressure, three courses per semester, twice per course.

Indeed, I quite like the law school model. Undergraduate students get educated in general skills that they hope to leverage to pass a more specific exam (LSAT). They move on to vocational training that, again, prepares for and culminates in a more specific exam (Bar).

Take grading out of this and you get all the benefits of education without credentialing and cheating isn’t even a thing. Students are in your courses to improve themselves towards a goal that is not directly related to you or your course material. No “will this be on the exam”, no “this will ruin my GPA”. “Cheaters” aren’t even deserving of the name, and genuinely hurt nobody but themselves. There’s no grades they could “devalue” or credential they could be mistakenly awarded.

I do run my own courses according to this vision. I mostly teach non-majors, and in fact many pre-law students. It is *monumentally* more important to me that every student in my class has the opportunity to receive a foundational education in philosophical thinking than that I correctly credential them. I can share how I implement this if you want to know.

Louis Zapst
Louis Zapst
9 months ago

Over the years, I’ve sometimes given quizzes. When I do give them, I make sure I create a new quiz every semester (easy when you also change the readings or topics to keep things fresh) and I create different quizzes to different sections during the same semester. I also change paper assignment topics every semester. I don’t understand why some teachers insist on teaching the esact same syllabus and using the same exact materials semester after semester, sometimes for decades. That seems lazy, which this guy wasn’t, as we know from the effort he took to entrap his students.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  Louis Zapst
9 months ago

1) I do mix it up every semester. That’s why only 45 of the 80 questions on the final carried over from last semester.

2) I didn’t entrap anyone. Entrapment is when you entice someone to do something illicit that they otherwise wouldn’t have done. I didn’t make them go to the website, I just got there first and set up a camera.

Double A
Reply to  Louis Zapst
9 months ago

Yeah, if you just teach 4 entirely new and different classes every semester, you can totally avoid this!

Bryan Frances
9 months ago

It really wouldn’t be that hard to use only in-person assessment, with paper and pen only. If you want to assess them over longer than one class period, okay: make the midterm happen over two class periods. Final exam periods are already usually two or three hours.

Even some online courses have the option to take midterms and finals in a classroom.

It’s not the perfect solution (e.g., no long essays, with multiple drafts; it doesn’t apply to short quizzes). But it is available to many of us most of the time and makes a lot of these difficulties just go away. No?

MJD
MJD
Reply to  Bryan Frances
9 months ago

Not in this case. It’s an online class with students spread far and wide.

Grad student
9 months ago

I would encourage you to imagine the following scenario. You are up for a fancy job at a fancy school. Your friend in the department lets you know that he has some insider knowledge of what you should say in your interview to get the job. Would you seriously decline his offer? Would you fault someone who didn’t?

(This is unfortunately how cheating likely feels to many of your students. I’m not saying this is how it should be, but it is how it is.)

Now here is why I find what you did cruel. Let’s imagine your friend who reached out to you was a bit of a stickler deep down, and decided to offer this ‘advice’ as a test of your moral scrupules. In fact the information he was offering to pass along to you was false — the opposite of what you should say in the interview. Would you regard him as a good friend?

Daniel Weltman
Reply to  Grad student
9 months ago

When you say “this is unfortunately how cheating likely feels to many of your students,” I take you to be implicitly saying that the students are making a mistake to feel this way about cheating. Meanwhile I am not sure if you think the job candidate who takes the advice is making a mistake to think that taking the advice is fine.

If taking the advice is fine, and students are confused about whether cheating is fine, then in the case where your friend misled you, we can say he was a bad friend because he led you astray when you were doing something fine, whereas the students who are led astray were not doing something fine.

If taking the advice is bad similar to how cheating is bad, then I would say what your friend did was not very friendly but it was certainly an effective teaching tool for you. Maybe it’s bad to teach via punitive means like this, but it’s certainly a lesson you’re not likely to forget. My friend is not a good friend but he might be a decent teacher.

Certainly if my friend asked me to turn in a 7 page paper on Hegel in a couple weeks or else he was going to do something that left a bad mark on my transcript and potentially hurt my chances at getting a job or getting into grad school, I would not think of him as a great friend. And yet we routinely do that sort of thing to our students. So I’m not sure “would this behavior mark someone as a good friend” is a great test for whether a teacher ought to engage in that behavior.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  Grad student
9 months ago

Is there a rule saying it’s wrong to accept such advice? If my friend tells me to dump shares of his company and I know to act on his advice would be illegal insider trading, then the joke is on me if it turns out to be a lie or error and I lose my shorts on shorts. If the students are told they can consult online materials and past exams, then it would be cruel and wrong to trick them by posting false answers. If they’re told that it’s prohibited cheating to look up exam answers online, then whatever happens after that is their own fault and nobody else’s.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Grad student
9 months ago

I would also be a bad friend if I gave letter grades to my friends or constantly corrected their grammar, or made them schedule appointments with me during office hours. Should we stop doing that as well?

Laura
Laura
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

Could this be why I don’t have more friends?

Jonathan M
9 months ago

Maybe I’m just naive, but I really dislike the adversarial relationship between professors and students that our current educational paradigm sets up. I don’t think this is a normal or natural thing. You don’t see people engaging in dishonest communication as much in typical relationships. In other areas of life we have a strong incentive to send accurate and honest signals about ourselves. I think this is because many kinds of interactions are mutually beneficial or mutually harmful, so our interests ideally should be aligned with the interests of others. I think academia (and one could argue, capitalism more generally) artificially sets up a zero sum game. Things like strict grading curves do this explicitly. Ultimately, I think this is an issue with the way academia interfaces with capitalism. I don’t know the solution, but I think some clearly harmful aspects of academia include the permanency of grades on your transcript, the high monetary stakes, the concurrency if learning and assessing (I generally think it would be better to allow students to build a large knowledge base before being forced to prove their knowledge – learning requires time and repetition in varied contexts to really be cemented), and the way our culture ties academic success to identity.

James
9 months ago

I’m inclined to think that this is fine. But given some of the comments about what, exactly, is supposed to be wrong with cheating and the extent to which responding to it is worrisome, I think it’s important to bear in mind a couple reasons that I haven’t seen mentioned, and rarely even hear voiced. I suspect the failure to notice/discuss them is partly due to the charitable attitude dedicated and caring instructors generally adopt toward their students (a good attitude!).

One reason why cheating is wrong: It’s insulting to the instructor. Expressing this reason can make one sound pompous and self-important (and I bet pompous and self-important instructors are especially bothered by cheating for this reason). But it’s true even for (maybe especially for) dedicated and caring instructors. I put a lot of time and effort into grading my students’ work. I do this largely because I want to give my students accurate and helpful feedback. The students have a claim on me to provide them with feedback for their work. They don’t have any claim on me to provide them with feedback for someone else’s work. And I’m not interested in providing such feedback. It’s a waste of my time, which is stretched thin, and a waste of my expertise, which I could have devoted to other students if I hadn’t just wasted it on grading something that I needn’t have graded in order to provide worthless feedback to a person who didn’t need (or likely want) it. In addition, there’s an implicit expression that I can be fooled; it’s not weird to resent being tricked, or having someone try to trick you, and to perceive this as insulting behavior is completely natural in most other contexts. I don’t think it does students any favors to pretend that it’s any different in the classroom. Again, expressing this forthrightly can be misread (or probably, in some instances, correctly read) as needlessly authoritarian. But I think it would be a mistake to fail to notice the way in which cheating is disrespectful and insulting toward the instructor.

A second reason cheating is wrong is that it degrades trust in the classroom. Students are, I think, generally not very aware of how much trust is involved in the student/teacher relationship. For the relationship to work, a significant amount of trust is required. For example, students need to trust that their instructors are not telling them things that they know to be flatly false, or that they ought to know to be flatly false. When it comes to grades, students have to trust that the instructor is providing accurate and fair assessments. If this trust is lost, then feedback and grades become largely worthless. I mention this in my classes when I talk to students about cheating. I ask them to consider how they would feel if it came to light that I graded their work in a capricious or irresponsible manner (e.g., throwing the exams down the stairs and grading based on where they land, etc.). Even if this is rectified, how could they ever go back to trusting my assessments? Would they feel confident that, moving forward, I would change my ways? Similarly, it strikes me as odd to merely fail a student for the relevant assignment rather than the course when they are found to have cheated. The breakdown in trust is the same: Why should I think that the next paper they turn in is their work? How can I go back to trusting them? This all might sound dramatic, but I really do think the destruction of trust in the classroom is about the worst thing that can happen for an educator. I need my students to know that I am, fundamentally, working with them toward a shared goal; but I need to know that they are, at least minimally, engaged in that shared project with me as well. Once they reveal that they aren’t interested and are actively subverting it (or once they learn that I am doing so), the entire project is endangered.

So: I’m not claiming these are the two main or most important reasons cheating is wrong (for that matter, personally, grade grubbing bothers me more than cheating does). I do think, though, that it’s completely reasonable to cite these reasons about why cheating is wrong: (1) it’s disrespectful and insulting to the instructor personally, and (2) it undermines the mutual trust that is required for education to succeed.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  James
9 months ago

This is a wonderful comment, James. Thank you for both these important points, which I hadn’t considered in quite this light.

Grad Student
Reply to  James
9 months ago

Yes, it’s insulting, and it’s fine to resent being tricked. But the student is not doing it to insult you. Feelings of insult and humiliation should not be driving your pedagogical policies. So I struggle to see how this point is relevant. As instructors, we must look past our personal feelings when designing policies to promote learning.

Yes, it degrades trust. But so do most mechanisms of enforcement, especially Professor Merriam’s. Do you really think that a professor deliberately planting false exam answers promotes trust? Why would students think a professor who resorts to those tactics is working toward a shared goal? Authoritarian anti-cheating policies to more to erode trust than a handful of isolated cases of cheating.

James
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

(1) To be clear, I meant my comment to be directed primarily at other comments in which people were having a discussion about what, if anything, is wrong with cheating. Nothing I said was meant to be an endorsement or justification Merriam’s actions (beyond justifying the claim that cheating is wrong.)

(2) Of course I don’t think that “feelings of insult and humiliation” should be “driving” my or anyone else’s pedagogy, and I wasn’t suggesting that. But it’s insulting to waste someone else’s time or to try to fool them into doing something they don’t want or have to do, and it’s reasonable to (a) convey to students that you don’t like this and (b) impose consequences on students who do it. It’s possible that you could do this in such a way that you let feelings of insult drive your pedagogy, and this would be deranged and obsessive (one professor I had as an undergrad leaps to mind). But that’s not required. I only think that the insulting nature of cheating is one (and not the only) reason for thinking it’s wrong. That leaves open how you should respond, and that will vary depending on lots of factors (e.g., How insulting was it? How sensitive are you to insult? Has it happened before?).

(3) I disagree that “we must look past our personal feelings when designing policies to promote learning.” This might be true of certain personal feelings (I can’t just decide that all Peytons will get worse treatment because I knew a Peyton once and I didn’t like him), but not all. Importantly, I’m definitely not required to simply accept being continually insulted or having my time wasted. That, of course, doesn’t entitle me to do whatever I want in order to prevent any insult or time-wasting. But teachers (like most employees) deserve a level of respectful treatment in their place of employment and it’s weird to me to think students would be benefited if we treated them as immune to expressions of resentment and the resulting consequences when they behave insultingly.

(4) Just to clarify: It’s possible to recognize that cheating is insulting without feeling insulted and nevertheless discouraging the behavior. I think acting out of that feeling can be fine (and can also not be fine), but isn’t required.

(5) A philosophical aside: For broadly Strawsonian reasons, I actually think that expressions of resentment (or at least the ability to express resentment) are part of what’s involved in being in a fully moral relationship with another person. So eliminating or seriously mitigating the possibility of such expressions strikes me as treating students as not in full moral “communion” with their teachers. This is a good idea for very young children. Less so for mature adults. Our students are, admittedly, often in between, and this should be borne in mind when deciding how to respond. But your post makes me think you’re suggesting a treatment more appropriate to younger children than our students are. (One reason I think so: The majority of our students’ capacity to feel shame when caught.)

(6) Lastly, I basically agree with you about your concern about Merriam’s actions and its effect on trust in the classroom. That strikes me as being the best reason against it (better than facilitating cheating, for example). I’m not certain that this is enough of a concern to show that Merriam ought not to have done it, though. If cheating is sufficiently rampant, trust might not be on the table in the classroom, and interventions that wouldn’t be warranted in more trusting circumstances might be justified in order to try to eventually regain a condition of trust. This is especially the case given that the students primarily affected in this case cheated and had already abandoned mutual trust. But maybe this would really bother students who had no interest in cheating (I’d like to know what the non-cheaters in Merriam’s class think), in which case this concern might overwhelm his good intentions.

Derek
Derek
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

“Do you really think that a professor deliberately planting false exam answers promotes trust?”

While this may not be directed at me, my answer is this practice DOES promote trust among some people.

Back when I was a student (who didn’t cheat), I would have more trust in a system that catches cheaters.

If I were hiring graduates from a college, I’d have more trust hiring graduates from a college that was good at catching cheaters vs. a college that let cheaters slide.

Of course, this practice may erode trust among cheaters. But then again, I could argue that any type of anti-cheating method could have a similar effect. Such as walking around the classroom to make sure students aren’t using hidden notes for instance.

Clayton
9 months ago

Hey Garrett,
It’s been ages. I hope all’s well. I have a few concerns about this that I thought I’d raise. These aren’t about the ethics of the thing (unless we take some super-broad notion of the ethics of the thing), but here goes.

  1. I was worried about timing. It’s not clear from the story whether there’s a rule that prohibits students from using online materials they find to -study-, including past exams and answers. Lots of students have access to past exams and answers and lots of schools consider the use of those materials to study permissible (e.g., in my undergrad college, so many old exams and answers were in circulation thanks to fraternities and sororities, that the general policy seemed to be that it would be better for all students to get the chance to use past exams to prepare than to let only members of these groups have that resource). I think there’s a potential difference between the case where you upload bad answers that could be used for permissible study guides and the case where they were uploaded only after the exam ‘went live’ and there was a rule prohibiting students from using any materials to aid in their answers. (If someone is going to follow G’s lead, I hope they take account of this.)
  2. I was worried about you and those who followed your lead. It’s not clear from your story whether you checked with the university about the permissibility of doing this. There are lots of similar interventions we might take to try to catch students cheating (e.g., we could write papers for paper mills and then bust the students that submit the pieces we wrote). I would think that if the university caught wind of some of these schemes, they might be upset. I would worry about whether a dean or chair might find some rule or principle to use against you in response to angry parents before trying this out.
  3. I worry about what this might do to relations between students and professors. I think it might be corrosive for those relations if they think professors are putting out ‘traps’ (e.g., moonlighting as writers for paper mills who then bust the students who use those mills when they put back on their professor’s hat).

On the ethical issue, I guess I worry a bit about people in positions of power intervening if it boosts the probability that someone is tempted to break a rule. Consider so-called theft by finding. Thanks to the 1968 Theft Act, it’s illegal in the United Kingdom to keep cash you find, say, in a park or on a public street, if you don’t make an attempt to see to it that it is returned to its rightful owner (e.g., by bringing it to a shop, handing it to the police, etc.). I think if the police were to leave cash out and run stings where they punished needy people who found the cash and kept it we’d be outraged, in part, because we’d think that they were creating conditions that made it more likely that people would break the rule. I guess I don’t think it’s the job of the police to run tests of our moral character to find the points where we’d give in to temptation (and punish us once the point is found), but to enforce the laws that (legend has it) are there to protect the values we care about. It’s sort of kind of hard to run these operations without altering the probabilities that someone might be tempted to use resources they weren’t supposed to. (As has been noted elsewhere, we also shouldn’t just compare the status quo to the situation in which you intervene if you can intervene by lowering the probabilities that someone uses these resources by having them taken down.) Maybe you managed to do that and that’s a difference between your case and the case of the theft act. Maybe if you can do it, it’s not wrong (waiving delicate questions about the wrong of damaging the relations between professors and students) but it might be less than ideal given (1)-(3).

TQ White II
TQ White II
9 months ago

I asked ChatGPT (4) about this. FYI…

“on an online quiz cheating site for students, a professor replaced a quiz with one that had several incorrect answers that he could detect when students used them. Discuss the ethics of this action.”

When discussing the ethics of the professor’s actions, it is essential to consider different perspectives and the intentions behind their decision. From the professor’s standpoint, one may argue that they are trying to maintain academic integrity and discourage cheating. Education aims to cultivate critical thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge acquisition in students. Cheating undermines these objectives and might lead to a lack of understanding or skills in the long run.

On the other hand, the professor’s approach might not be considered the most ethical solution. By intentionally providing incorrect answers, they are putting honest, hardworking students at risk of receiving lower grades due to misleading information. This situation might also create mistrust between the students and the professor, as students may feel deceived or manipulated.

A more ethical approach could involve addressing the issue of cheating directly by implementing stricter measures, offering support to students who struggle with the course material, or exploring alternative assessment methods that encourage original thinking.

In conclusion, while the professor’s intentions may have been to uphold academic integrity, the chosen method might not be the most ethical. A more proactive and transparent approach to addressing the issue of cheating would be more beneficial for both students and educators, fostering a healthy learning environment.

Mikel Edward Satcher
9 months ago

In the real world of ethics, the professor committed an act of entrapment which is a crime usually associated with corrupt cops who use entrapment as low-lying fruit to capture those who might not have moved in that direction (while the big fish are left alone to continue their network of criminality) if not for the acts of entrapment. In addition, the larger goal of academic integrity, as described by NECHE, is to create ways to prevent or decrease opportunities for student academic integrity violations as opposed to creating more opportunities for students to cheat. The professor essentially brought reproach to both his college and himself, and he should be reprimanded; the students should be given another opportunity to retake another form of the exam, but possibly with a lower grade. In the era of rising availability of Artificial Intelligence, traditional take-home exams are not recommended. The professor, along with his colleagues in is department, should consider creating more authentic forms of assessment, etc.

David
David
Reply to  Mikel Edward Satcher
8 months ago

You’ll be pleased to hear the courts sentenced Professor Merriam to seven years in a maximum security prison for the crime of entrapment. That will teach him.

Billy
Billy
9 months ago

My two cents:

Garret did nothing wrong and should not feel any guilt. If anything, we should thank him. As Prof L indicated above, some of us sometimes let cheating go without doing anything about it because it is stressful and time-consuming to report students for cheating and to deal with the whole thing. I am sometimes guilty of this. I sometimes look the other way when students cheat, not because looking the other way is right (indeed, it is wrong), but because I am too emotionally depleted at the time to deal with the whole thing. It’s weakness of will on my end. I know it’s not admirable, and I wish I were better than I am. In any case, I want to thank Garret. There have to be punishments for cheaters, not to get retribution against them, but rather for rehabilitating them, for deterring future cheating, for keeping the whole system of education going properly (which requires that people have faith that the system is largely honest), and for the sake of fairness to the honest (non-cheating) students.

Now, all that said, I don’t actually think there needs to be a further punishment in this particular case. So, if I were in Garret’s shoes or the shoes of Garret’s chair, I would not give students a zero on the test or an F in the course. It seems to me that there is enough punishment contained in (a) getting a terrible grade on the final exam (e.g., if a cheating student got a 30% on the final exam, that is a pretty bad grade in itself) and (b) the embarrassment (and maybe guilt) that many of the cheating students must feel right now (they must be thinking, “How stupid could I have been to think that those answers on the test on Quizlet were correct?”).

I guess part of my leniency on the punishment end comes from knowing that Quizlet is often used by students for studying. So a good number of the cheating students likely first went there, not with the intention of finding the exact answers to this exact test, but rather with the intention of finding answers to questions similar to those that might be asked on this test, that is, with the aim of helping them on this test. That is not clearly cheating: it’s not good and might be morally wrong, but it’s not clearly cheating either. Then, once the students got onto Quizlet and found this exact test, they should have told themselves, “I refuse to use this. To use this would clearly be cheating. This is my exact test.” But at that point it would have taken great strength of will to refuse to use the test found on Quizlet (i.e., it would have taken great strength of will to refuse to cheat).

Maybe some of my leniency on the punishment end also comes from personal experience. There have been a few times in my life (and once in the court system) where, although I was punished for wrongdoing on my end, I was punished in ways that allowed me to recover over the long run without losing too, too much. I am very grateful, looking back, for the people who showed me mercy: they didn’t give me a free pass or look the other way, but they also didn’t crush me. And they definitely could have.

Grad Student
Reply to  Billy
9 months ago

Why do you think that rehabilitating students who are inclined to cheat requires punishing them?

Billy
Billy
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

I’m no expert on punishment. But I’ll try my best. Let me start by conceding that there might be some cheating students who do not need punishment to be rehabilitated. That said, I do think that the vast majority need it, at least if we are talking about getting the process of rehabilitation going in the near term. (The long term is different. Over the long term, personal experiences can lead people to change in significant ways. For a cheating student, maybe in the long term he or she is victimized by a cheating boyfriend or girlfriend, or is victimized by identity theft, or forms a close relationship with an extremely honest person and comes to admire honesty; and maybe in turn, over the long term, this cheating student comes to have a strong aversion to all forms of dishonesty and cheating, including in himself or herself.) 
 
On the meaning of “rehabilitation:” I guess this word could just mean “the person stops with the offending behavior.” Alternatively, it could and usually does mean something stronger, namely, “the person stops with the offending behavior and is intrinsically motivated to stop the offending behavior.” Punishment obviously helps with the weaker form of rehabilitation, since it provides an external disincentive. But that in turn helps with the stronger form of rehabilitation. For once the cheating student stops performing the offending behavior (cheating) and does this repeatedly, the good habit of not cheating is in place. Although this good habit was put in place due to an extrinsic motivation, it is nevertheless a good habit. And once this good habit is in place, it is easier to start to work on the internal beliefs and desires and in turn to correct them. So this makes it easier for an intrinsic motivation to be honest (not cheat) to become ingrained in the person.
 
Maybe it would also help to think of cheating students as falling into different categories: weakness-of-will cheaters, cognitively motivated cheaters, and those who are mixes of the two or somehow vacillating between the two. Start, then, with students who cheat due to weakness of will: they believe cheating is, all things considered, not worth doing or practically uncalled for, but they do it anyway, due to some kind of appetitive failure. These students are going against their own best judgment. And they will feel shame, or guilt, or regret if they cheat. What they need to stop cheating is some kind of force that counteracts their appetitive problem. The threat of punishment for being caught cheating is a good candidate — and presumably the only available candidate (right?) — for being the counteractive force that is needed here. But an empty threat of punishment doesn’t seem sufficient here: following through with an actual punishment seems to be needed here. Now, once the punishment is administered, the cheating problem might or might not go away (i.e., rehabilitation might or might not follow). But I do think the punishment is needed for rehabilitation to have a chance in the weakness-of-will case. What would the alternative be? That the cheating student finds a way to correct his or her appetitive failing on his or her own? But how would that work? As I said above, there might be some cases (in the near term) where students are able without punishment to rehabilitate themselves (or otherwise to become rehabilitated). But I’m skeptical that there could be very many cases of this sort.

Now consider students who cheat, not due to weakness of will, but rather due to their believing that it is, all things considered, worth it or okay for them to cheat. Lots of my own students seem to be in this category. Lots of them seem to think that, although “society” says that cheating is wrong and ought not be done, “society” is mistaken about that. Many of my students seem to think, “I pay a zillion dollars for college, and I deserve a payoff for this in the form of good grades that will help me in getting a good, high-paying job; and if I need to cheat to get good grades, I’ll do it. It’s not admirable to cheat. But it is (overall) okay, given the screwed up, unfair world we live in.” Whatever exactly the thought process is here, the main point is that, cognitively, these students are, all things considered, in favor of cheating. I take it that, when I am aware of cheating and do not punish it, I am in effect telling these cognitively motivated cheaters that their belief that cheating is (overall) worth it or okay is a belief that I do not oppose – or, at any rate, do not oppose strongly enough to do anything about it. But in that case, I am in effect telling them that their belief is not clearly false. So, they will likely persist in their belief, thinking to themselves: “My teacher doesn’t punish cheating even when aware of it. That helps to confirm for me that I am correct in thinking that cheating is (overall) worth it or okay.” By contrast, if I punish cheating when I catch it, then I at least send the message that I think it’s a serious wrong. And this in turn would force the students to realize that there is at least one person (i.e., their teacher) who disagrees with their belief that cheating is (overall) worth it or okay. This then at least gives these students a chance to start to question and in turn correct this false belief of theirs. Without punishment, I don’t think the chance is even there (at least not for the vast majority of students in the near term).
 
I guess a third category of cheating cases would be ones that do not cleanly count as either weakness-of-will cases or cases where the students are intellectually convinced that cheating is (overall) worth it or okay. I actually think a lot of cheating cases are like this. The students aren’t sure what they think of cheating. They are cognitively conflicted. And their desires are conflicted as well. Again here, I think punishment is needed for rehabilitation (at least for most students in the near term). Punishment is the only way to send the message that at least one person (the teacher) is convinced that cheating is (on the whole) not okay. And punishment is the only available force to counteract any desires of theirs that are disposing them to cheat.

Prof L
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

In my case, it’s simply my experience dealing with cheating students. Students who face no consequences, even when caught, are not rehabilitated. They do it again, in my experience, pretty much down to the man/woman.

In other words, I’ve had MULTIPLE cheating scenarios go in exactly this way: I catch the student, confront the student, they confess, we have a heart-to-heart, discussing the importance of integrity and honesty in academic work, they tell me they have been having a hard time lately and assure me it won’t happen again. In a fit of over-generous compassion and concern for their well-being I make them re-do the assignment instead of outright failing them. THEY CHEAT AGAIN.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  Prof L
9 months ago

If it makes you feel any better the same has happened to me and other teachers I know. It probably doesn’t make you feel any better. I’m sorry people are this way!

JDRox
JDRox
9 months ago

Frankly, I think pretty much everyone opposed to what Garret did is likely to be doing something wrong in their courses by not policing/preventing cheating enough. The reason we have a systematic problem with cheating is because people don’t police/prevent it enough. That’s the fundamental/cultural and ultimately most destructive form of “entrapment”/”honeypotting” or whatever. The existence of the “systematic” problem is largely due to you. I hope you take responsibility for your actions, repent, and reform.

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

“repent”? “reform”?

Laura
Laura
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

I think what he did is amusing but that doesn’t mean teachers are to blame for not being good enough at policing cheating. It’s very difficult to detect and stop. If our only or most important job was to stop cheating, then it might be more reasonable to complain. I don’t even think assessing student learning is as important as accomplishing the learning, even though the assessment is important. Making sure the assessments are as accurate as possible, given miscreant behavior, is even lower down the list.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

I agree that our most important job isn’t to stop cheating. But we still should put in a good faith effort, and my impression is that many of Garrett’s critics aren’t dong that. (Of course, they may disagree with that characterization of what they’re doing, but the relevant principle is “put in a good faith effort” not “put in what you believe to be a good faith effort”. A good faith effort requires, in these sad times, a semi-significant amount of effort.)

Nicolas Delon
Nicolas Delon
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

Your impression against my impression that many of his defenders aren’t putting a good faith effort into disincentivizing cheating in the first place. What gives?

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Nicolas Delon
9 months ago

The disagreement might be about what should be done to prevent cheating. There are at least to practices to prevent it: (1) deter by identifying and punishing cheaters and (2) disincentivize by improving teaching and assessment. Defenders of GM appear to prefer deterrence, and critics appear to prefer disincentivizing.

Both practices can be time-consuming and unfulfilling. It’s easy for people on each side to view the opposing side as not doing enough of thier preferred practice.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I’m all for using all available tools, but I honestly don’t understand how “improving teaching and assessment” disincentives cheating.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

To disincentivize it isn’t necessarily to remove every incentive: cheating can be disincentivized by removing even just one reason or desire to cheat. The assessment method sometimes makes it easy to cheat (e.g., poorly-designed multiple-choice exams make it easy to Google answers). The ease gives students a reason to cheat, and creating a better exam can remove the reason. Further, poor teaching can give students an interest in cheating (e.g., boring or badly-structured lectures impede students’ learning). Using good examples, asking interesting questions, and having a clear structure in lectures can remove the reason.

Does that help?

Last edited 9 months ago by Sam
JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Yes! Thanks. I definitely believe in designing assessment methods to make it harder to cheat. (I always have two versions of every test, etc.) But now I’m puzzled why people “on the other side” think that those of us who deter by identifying and punishing cheaters aren’t using these methods too.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

Possibly, they’re just thinking that more could be done, and assuming that if enough were being done, there wouldn’t be so much support for identifying and punishing cheaters. I suppose some might think that after enough disincentivizing, cheating decreases to the point that identifying and punishing cheaters would be nearly completely unnecessary.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Sure. I am fortunate enough to teach in person, and I only very rarely have trouble with people cheating on exams. But others are not so fortunate, and my understanding is that cheating on exams in online classes is rampant.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

My anecdotal observations have been that cheating increases whenever opportunity and motive are maximized. The two most common hotbeds of cheating have been online courses (max opportunity and minimal connection to the professor or other students) and Honors courses (many students extremely concerned about having the best grades, and very few of them worried about longer-term relationship to the professor or philosophy dept.). The least cheating has been observed in courses with students who expect to get average or low grades and won’t be particularly harmed if that’s the outcome, or courses mostly populated by philosophy majors who expect to take another course with you and care about the long-term relationship. My causal analysis might be wrong but I’m reasonably confident about where the cheating happens most and least.

One thing people aren’t talking about much in these comments is the relationship between expectations about grades and cheating. Over time, the expectation of higher grades and sense of entitlement to those higher grades seems correlated with more cheating. Philosophy tends to give less high grades than most other subjects (I encourage those with access to their institutional data to look this up), and as a group, students who worry they won’t get an A, but are expecting and demanding an A, have been more likely to cheat than groups of students with less pressure on grades. It’s imperfect analysis based on my small set of data but I think the cheating/ grades relationship is worth exploring further.

Sam
Sam
9 months ago

Are you the unethical one? Maybe. The following arguments have yet to be undermined by anything I’ve seen here.

Cheating is wrong. If cheating is wrong, then facilitating cheating is wrong. Garet Merriam facilitated cheating (by posting the fake answers for students to use to cheat).

You ought to avoid punishing people for any action A that they wouldn’t have done but for your intervention to entice them to do A. He posted the fake answers for the purpose of enticing students to use them and thereby cheat. They wouldn’t have used those answers if he hadn’t posted them. He then punished students for using them.

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I want to catch the porch pirate who has been stealing packages off my porch. I install a camera on the porch. The next time I get a delivery, I remove the goods, replace them with stones, reseal the box, and place the box back on the porch. The thief steals the box and I record him doing so.

I facilitated the theft but did nothing wrong. This is pretty much what Merriam did.

The students did something wrong. They went to a website and simply copied answers they found there onto an exam, believing these to be the correct answers, which they believed would lead to them getting a high grade, and without even paying minimal attention, thereby selecting answers Merriam says were obviously wrong, and that would have been known to be so by anyone paying minimal attention.

All the students who did this knew they were cheating. They are adults. They’ve learned about these things since early elementary school.

Last edited 9 months ago by Moti Gorin
Sam
Sam
Reply to  Moti Gorin
9 months ago

Thanks for the response.

You disagree with “if cheating is wrong, then facilitating cheating is wrong.” Your example is supposed to show that facilitating theft need not be wrong, even if theft is wrong. And you think there are enough morally relevant similarities between the two cases for us to reach the conclusion that facilitating cheating (in the specific case) is not wrong even if cheating (in the specific case) is wrong.

My provisional response is that there appears to be a difference relevant to our moral judgments. In your example, it’s not clear you’ve facilitated wrongdoing in the relevant sense. Are you actually and intentionally aiding the person in theft and thereby actually and intentionally contributing to wrongdoing? If so, you’ve done wrong. Otherwise, you haven’t done wrong, but you haven’t facilitated theft in the relevant sense.

I’m inclined to judge that you haven’t aided because your contribution (merely the box’s contents) made no difference to whether the theft would occur, for presumably the box would’ve been stolen even if it had had nothing in it. (The box isn’t transparent, I presume.) In the other case, Merriam actually and intentionally aided students in cheating and thereby contributed to wrongdoing. His contribution did make a difference to whether the wrongdoing would occur, as the fake answers gave the appearance of value.

Thoughts?

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

My understanding is that Garret removed (or asked Quizlet to remove) an exam that had been placed there by someone else. He then replaced this exam with the one the students copied from. So I don’t think his action made any difference to whether cheating would occur. It only made a difference with respect to how successful the cheaters would be in terms of getting correct answers (and in terms of getting caught).

I actually don’t know whether Garret facilitated cheating, or if I facilitated theft in my hypothetical porch pirate case. I’m inclined to think that in neither case is there any facilitation going on. If anything, Garret made cheating more difficult, insofar as (successful) cheating involves an unfair gain in advantage, and the wrong answers on his uploaded exam made advantage less likely. Maybe the students tried to cheat and failed, and trying to cheat is what they did wrong. Or maybe they stole access to information (the exam itself, independent of the provided answers), and so the cheating question is irrelevant to the wrongfulness.

But in any case, I think the cases are relevantly similar, independent of whether they are cases of facilitation. If this is right, and if I do nothing wrong in the porch case, then Garret did nothing wrong.

The one objection I can see here is that in the porch case, I already know that someone has been stealing and so when I set them up, I’m setting up someone I already know to be a wrongdoer. Garret’s case is a bit different, but I don’t think it makes much of a difference because in any class that’s reasonably large, we have good reason to believe (“know” might be a bit too strong, technically) that people are cheating or will cheat.

Last edited 9 months ago by Moti Gorin
Sam
Sam
Reply to  Moti Gorin
9 months ago

I agree that if the cases are relevantly similar, and you do nothing wrong, then Merriam did nothing wrong. The issue for me is that I’m more inclined to say that you do nothing wrong than that Merriam did nothing wrong. So, I’m not sure the cases are relevantly similar.

I hope we can we agree: (1) The students used the fake answers to attempt to earn credit and (2) thereby cheated. (3) Their cheating as they did was wrong. (4) Had Merriam not uploaded those answers, the students wouldn’t have used those answers and (5) therefore wouldn’t have cheated as they did. (6) They likely would’ve used other answers if Merriam had not intervened.

For me, (1) through (5) are enough to conclude that Merriam intentionally aided the students in their wrongdoing, since he uploaded the fake answers for the purpose of having students use them (so he could more easily catch them in the act). Sure, they would’ve cheated and done wrong by different means if he hadn’t uploaded the fake answers, but they wouldn’t have cheated and done wrong *as they did*. So, for me, (6) is irrelevant to the question of whether Merriam aided (or “facilitated”) their cheating as they did.

Some would believe that Merriam’s aiding in the student’s wrongdoing is itself wrongdoing. Justifying this would require (I think) appeal to some principle such as any aiding in wrongdoing is wrongdoing. But I suppose you should want to say that, to the contrary, you aided the pirate in the exact same way, but did no wrong. This is what I’m not sure about. My questions would be: Do good intentions (of catching wrongdoers in the act) justify what would otherwise be wrongdoing? Do the good ends justify the means?

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I think 4 is irrelevant to the moral question. If I replace a potential killer’s ghost gun with an otherwise identical gun that has a serial number so that in the event that he shoots me he’ll be caught, and he shoots me, I have not facilitated his shooting me in any morally relevant sense.

I realize I keep appealing to cases, and that’s because I just haven’t thought about the principle at play, and probably won’t.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Moti Gorin
9 months ago

In this new case, you apparently don’t know whether the person will kill. That’s a morally relevant difference. To my mind, if the case is modified so that you replace the gun knowing it will be used to kill, that makes a difference to my willingness to judge you as doing nothing wrong.

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

If that makes a difference, then the case should on your view speak against Garret’s having done wrong, because he couldn’t have known the students would cheat. No doubt he suspected they might, or even thought it likely, but he didn’t know.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Moti Gorin
9 months ago

Yes, and it does. But he acted in part because he was sufficiently confident some students would use the answers to cheat. That matters too.

Preston Stovall
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Regarding the first argument, I treat “cheating is wrong” and “facilitating cheating is wrong” as generic sentences. Consequently, the argument’s validity turns on reading each evaluation as qualified by “generally”. In which case, it doesn’t follow that Merriam’s act is a case of what the premises generally assert. And because a plausible case has been made, from a number of directions, that what Merriam did was not only not obviously wrong, but perhaps to be commended, I don’t think we should read the argument as good in terms of some notion weaker than validity.

Concerning the second argument, presumably there are many counterfactual situations where the students would have cheated without Merriam intentionally, under this description, presenting them an opportunity to cheat. Consequently, the first claim doesn’t appear relevant to the case at hand, and the third looks simply false. More substantively, I can imagine all sorts of cases where you have a moral obligation to punish someone whom you’ve “enticed” into doing something. For instance, when doing so in order to teach someone, under your pedagogical care, a lesson about the importance of integrity.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Preston Stovall
9 months ago

Regarding your response to the first argument, the argument can easily be rewritten so as to avoid the issue you raise:

The students’ cheating was wrong. If so, facilitating their cheating was wrong. Merriam facilitated their cheating.

Your response to the second argument suffers from the same problem as your response to the first. The action under consideration needn’t be described as “cheating.” Of course, Merriam punished the students for cheating, but more specifically for using the fake answers he provided in attempting to earn credit. So, the first claim (you ought to avoid punishing…) is relevant since students wouldn’t have used the answers Merriam provided but for Merriam’s intervention to entice them to do it. And the third isn’t false, since they wouldn’t have used the answers he posted if he hadn’t posted them.

The principle of the second argument supports the claim that there’s a moral obligation to avoid punishing someone for something they wouldn’t have done but for your intervention to entice them to do it, even when you’re “doing so in order to teach [the person], under your pedagogical care, a lesson about the importance of integrity.” And the claim rests on the intuitive appeal of the principle. You’ve simply asserted that there’s a moral obligation to the contrary, without undermining the intuitive appeal of the principle. Perhaps you’d like to say enough to undermine it’s appeal.

Preston Stovall
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Now that the first argument has been revised, the second premise is the problem. The fact that people shouldn’t do something doesn’t entail that one shouldn’t facilitate their doing it — particularly if they fall under one’s pedagogical care, the act is no great moral evil, and it affords a learning experience. Consequently, the conditional expressing that entailment is false.

As for the principle you say grounds your stance on the second argument: I don’t share your sense of its “intuitive appeal” as anything but a general rule of thumb, easily defeated, as in the case at hand. There are plenty of occasions where it is not only permissible, but in which one is obliged, to facilitate people (perhaps under one’s tutelage) to do things they are inclined to do — but otherwise shouldn’t — so that they may learn something from the experience. That’s just part of what it is to teach people who, as with human beings, tend to act impulsively when they don’t know any better.

Ecpyrosis
Ecpyrosis
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

“You ought to avoid punishing people for any action A that they wouldn’t have done but for your intervention to entice them to do A.” is too general. It can be read as an argument for not punishing people who cheat on a test if you created a test in your class. After all, they wouldn’t have cheated if you hadn’t created the test, and by creating a test with different letter grades as a reward for getting the right answers, one is enticing them to cheat to get those answers.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Ecpyrosis
9 months ago

Thanks for raising this point. It’s a good one only if creating an exam on which students will be graded counts as intervening to entice cheating. But it doesn’t count as that: when I create exams, I don’t do it to entice students to cheat, even if it does in fact entice them to cheat. Hopefully that clarifies the matter for you.

Preston Stovall
9 months ago

Concerning students using the material to cheat, I’m having a tough time seeing how this is a case of morally objectionable “enticement” or “entrapment”. Getting busted for cheating is a learning experience, and it’s not one with a terribly great cost. We’re not talking about prison or public beatings. And so for those who would take the learning to heart, now is the time to get busted for cheating.

It also seems like academic dishonesty in higher education today is a greater problem than a lot of people realize. If that’s right, why isn’t it part of the proper solution to bring down the banhammer on cheating?

E Sargent
9 months ago

Quizlet is a legitimate study resource, not specifically a cheat site. Students use it as a way to study on a wide variety of subjects, akin to using flash cards to study for a math test. Students like it because its format makes it easy to study on their phones wherever they may be and whatever they may be doing. There is no way to know if the user-created information was illicitly obtained or just someone’s helpfully-posted study guide. The professor posted misinformation to the site and tagged students as cheaters if they learned the wrong information while studying. It seems unethical of the professor to ascribe nefarious intentions to students for preparing for his exam using what may have been a completely innocent method. An analogy would be if the professor printed a legitimate-looking textbook on the subject with wrong information, put it in the school library, and then punished all students who answered questions with the wrong information. It is likely that many students from other institutions are also now learning incorrect information, so, this professor has done a disservice to the education of students other than just his pupils.

MBW
MBW
Reply to  E Sargent
9 months ago

Moreover, none of these study sites are leakproof, so it’s likely that some of the questions with their wrong answers are going to end up elsewhere on the web as actual answers. Students trying to google something about Kant aren’t going to be in his class, but they might be getting his “obviously wrong” answers.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  MBW
9 months ago

The idea that my fake answers would ‘leak’ strikes me as fatuous. This isn’t the front page of the NYT. It’s not even my public YouTube channel. it’s a website designed for cheating, with a test posted by an anonymous source. Anyone who goes there does so with the intent to subvert the rules. No one is trying to genuinely learn about Chandran Kukathas’ thoughts on the ethics of immigration from that site, they’re trying to AVOID learning about it.

Grad Student
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

It is not a website designed for cheating. This is straightforwardly false. It may be a website that some students use in a capacity that qualifies as cheating, because others have uploaded confidential exam materials. But Quizlet is quite explicitly designed as a study resource.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

Well, I at least don’t have enough information to say whether the claim is straightforwardly false, or even false. IF one wanted to design a website for cheating, one might well dress it in the trappings of a study website, complete with an honor code, no?

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

No, it is not “straightforwardly false”—see my reply to you (or another Grad Student) just a few minutes ago in another thread about my comparison to Napster.

Anyway, it’s been debated for years now whether Quizlet was a cheating site; see link below. Again, this is an empirical question that none of us here can definitely say without seeing the underlying data (which might not exist, and I’m sure Quizlet doesn’t want to proactively find out).

But it’s very reasonable to think that it’s a cheating site insofar as many students in fact use it to cheat and have admitted as much, and there doesn’t seem to be much or any effort by Quizlet to kick off those users or otherwise enforce its own IP policies. If you know of such an effort or any instances at all, I’d be happy to be corrected.

Here’s an article from 2018, and I would bet all my money that the rate of cheating via Quizlet has increased since then:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/05/14/professors-warned-about-popular-learning-tool-used-students-cheat

Radagast
9 months ago

What you did isn’t unethical in the least. What the students did, was.

John Glenn
9 months ago

It would be very interesting to see the questions, and the obviously wrong answers.

Garret Merriam
Reply to  John Glenn
9 months ago

Here’s an example:

Question: In general, what would a utilitarian say about telling a white lie?

(Fake) Answer: it uses a rule that can’t be universalized hence is wrong.

Guillaume Pelletier
9 months ago

I’m not convinced that “looking at other tests without the instructor’s approval” is really cheating in the first place (I am assuming that every test is different and that all students have access to the same information, so looking at prior tests doesn’t unfairly put you at an advantage). You can surely arbitrarily decide that it is, setting the parameters for the students, but IMO this is at most a grey zone.

At the end of the day, the students are preparing for an exam by using all publicly available information at their disposal. I think this is great.

The problem is that they’re being fooled and not checking their work. They’re relying on information that is incompatible with what they ought to have learned in class. I’m not even sure that this counts as cheating, but it surely counts as failing.

Last edited 9 months ago by Guillaume Pelletier
Noah
Noah
Reply to  Guillaume Pelletier
9 months ago

Moreover, even if “looking at other tests without the instructor’s approval” is disallowed under the school policy, uploading a test to a publicly accessible site on the internet might well constitute giving permission to look at that test. As another post points out, the situation is much like putting a book in a library that is open for anyone to check out and read. Doesn’t that constitute permission to view the accessible materials?

Garret Merriam
Reply to  Noah
9 months ago

My name isn’t on the fake test. No student who goes there is going to see the fake test and believe I had anything to do with it. So no, finding the test cannot be construed as permission.

Noah
Noah
Reply to  Garret Merriam
9 months ago

My suggestion was not that a student finding the test could be construed as permission, but that you uploading the test to a publicly accessible internet site could be construed as permission to view the material. The analogy is that someone placing a book in the collection of a public library could be construed as permission on their behalf for anyone who goes to the library to view the content of the book.

Your reply seems to suggest that for your putting the test online to constitute permission to view it, your students must believe that you put the test online. The general principle seems to be: For A’s X-ing to constitute permission for B to Y, B must believe that A X’ed.

But this principle seems to be put into prima facie doubt by the library case: the users of the library do not need to believe that you placed the book in the library for your placing it to constitute permission to view it (they might not know who you are at all).

Now perhaps there’s a different reasoning behind your reply, but I’m not sure what it is.

Last edited 9 months ago by Noah
Junior Prof.
Reply to  Guillaume Pelletier
9 months ago

Even if “looking” at other tests is not cheating, it’s hard to understand how writing an answer that clearly reflects none of the student’s own understanding (and instead reflects what was in the obviously false answers) isn’t cheating.

Whomever
9 months ago

Not only should they fail, their degree should mention the number of times they were caught cheating. Since they have been shown to have cheated, the presumption should be that they have done so multiple times.

Why? Because the goal of going to University is to become skilled at something, not to buy a credential. It is about competence, not gaming the system. If someone has cheated, his/her competence is in question.

Tim
Tim
9 months ago

I find the situation utterly delicious. A professor had the task of determining if his students had learned ethics. He found a method which did precisely that.

Now the (few!) defenders of the (confessed!) cheaters are coming out of the woodwork to claim that the professor should instead have made a new, better test. But isn’t that exactly what he did?

Most professors I know agonize over having to split their time between teaching and research. This professor managed to find a way to combine them!

Rollo Burgess
9 months ago

This doesn’t seem unethical to me; that said, if it was only me I’d need to think harder about the validity of the assumptions around the statistical method here, but I assume all you learned types have done this.

Cheeky observation; I find the whole idea of assessing philosophy by a multiple choice test weird. The way I was assessed was to be put in a room for 3 hours with a pen and a lot of paper and write essays with titles I had not seen before. No scope for cheating at all.

Michelangelo Coca
9 months ago

I’m completely on the side of prof. Merriam.
The question “was he unethical” is sophistic; being ethical must be referred to some kind of ethic, and which is the one here? Accomplish to an internal policy? Not facilitate cheating? Not trick people in a honeypot, altogether, whatever the reason?
There is one main source of ethic, here: he is a teacher, he must make people to study, to read, and to retain as much as possible of what they’ve read (and, if possible, to understand it). What comes at side is just instrumental to this main ethic; the professor’s job is not to directly prevent cheating.
Professor Merriam certainly “facilitated” cheating; was that ethical? What has he accomplished with that?
He probably has stimulated his students to be more careful about studying and – more imortant – learning. He has given a kind of shock to his students minds. He also has warned them not to trust everything they find on the internet, ant to be cautious about that.
In conclusion, he has accomplished his teaching job, so he was “ethical”.

Jason Brennan
9 months ago

These students should strongly consider careers in academic history, where blatant plagiarism and quotation fabrication are allowed so long as you have the right views.

Grad Student
9 months ago

Quizlet is not a cheating site. In fact, Quizlet has an Honor Code on their website which prohibits, inter alia:

  • “Posting the answers to a test and sharing them with other students who haven’t taken the test yet”
  • “Sharing material on Quizlet with your classmates during a closed-book exam or test”
  • “Using Quizlet during an exam or test to plagiarize answers”
  • “Publicly posting material that your instructor has asked you not to”

Of course, some students may fail to comply with this honor code. However, it appears that Prof. Merriam has also failed to comply with the honor code, by publishing private exam materials and posting misinformation on the site.

State School Prof
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

You’re right. Professor Merriam has violated the integrity of Quizlet. He must now meet with their disciplinary committee and could face expulsion.

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

I remember when weed was illegal, headshops would have signs all over the place reminding everyone that the bongs they were selling were to be used for smoking tobacco only. I suppose some people may have used them that way.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Moti Gorin
9 months ago

This, right here!

I’ll reproduce Napster’s IP policy from my earlier comment today (for those of you who remember the site):

Napster Copyright Policy

Napster is an integrated browser and communications system provided by Napster, Inc., to enable musicians and music fans to locate bands and music available in the MP3 music format. The MP3 files that you locate using Napster are not stored on Napster’s servers. Napster does not, and cannot, control what content is available to you using the Napster browser. Napster users decide what content to make available to others using the Napster browser, and what content to download. Users are responsible for complying with all applicable federal and state laws applicable to such content, including copyright laws.

Napster respects copyright law and expects our users to do the same. Unauthorized copying, distribution, modification, public display, or public performance of copyrighted works is an infringement of the copyright holders’ rights. You should be aware that some MP3 files may have been created or distributed without copyright owner authorization. As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster will terminate the accounts of users who are repeat infringers of the copyrights, or other intellectual property rights, of others. In addition, Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service, or if Napster believes that user conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster, its affiliates, or other users, or for any other reason in Napster’s sole discretion, with or without cause.

Whether at a headshop or a website, it literally means nothing to publicize such policies if they don’t align with actual practices.

Moti Gorin
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

Napster is a great example. That kind of boilerplate legalese is itself a form of cheating.

T K
T K
Reply to  Grad Student
9 months ago

And sites that sell papers call them study tools.

Dan Mackenzie
9 months ago

Nothing unethical at all about what the teacher did.

Debbie Berkeley
9 months ago

It seems like nowadays, there is a tendency to assume that students are going to cheat, and to presume guilt before students even enter the classroom. While I understand that cheating is a big concern, the ones who are harmed the most, are the students who actually cheat. If professors focus on teaching and designing assessments and grading policies that reward critical thinking and do not depend on a competitive knockout system, cheaters will be more easily exposed, or at the very least, honest students will not be affected. I do not think anyone benefits from a system that is built on mistrust. If professors want students to behave in an honorable way, then they should not entrap them. This only sends a message that as they are becoming adults, they should assume the worst about others and then put the onus on others to prove them wrong. Is that really how we want to go about teaching young adults to live up to their best versions of themselves?

Michael
9 months ago

All colleges have an academic dishonesty policy. If the board does not support a policy against cheating, then this is more a board issue then it is a student population problem. I have worked at schools as an instructor and can tell you that this kind of board approach lessens a students degree because not learning the material, no matter the material, eventually reflects poorly on the school … not the student. The institution that issues that student it’s credentials will be remembered.
The teacher is not in the wrong and should seek employment with an organization that would emphasize these virtues.
The teacher if anything has now taught student to question what they have before them, think twice about acting dishonestly and do their own work. If one failed class teaches this precept it will have been worth the effort when they begin real life in their occupation. Isn’t this what training is about anyway?

Daniel Neisess
9 months ago

Attorney here with philosophy undergraduate degree.

I don’t see an ethical issue with making it easier to identify people cheating in this way. Hats off to the professor for clever mechanism for collecting the data. Though I suspect this large a pool of people attempting to cheat on the exam raises more interesting questions than what to do with them academically.

First of all, this may be one of many ways to cheat on this exam, for which the professor did not, likely could not, attempt to create a similar trap. This may just be the easiest method some students attempted.

I think the much more interesting question is why such a large number of students (even just looking at the number who were caught) were driven to cheat. And what does this say about the structure of academics and methods of teaching (generally, not specific to this professor’s course). Are students feeling that the task of actually learning the complicated materials being presented in such a short amount of time, impracticable or not worth the effort? Would pride be enough to sustain me if I were surrounded by peers who used 1/16th the effort I did and received better grades because they cheated and I did not? I’m certainly not being rewarded by our academic setting in that situation.

Certainly, from a resource and problem solving standpoint, what is considered academic dishonesty in university settings is greatly admired in our current workforce and political society.

A board of directors would be very pleased with a CEO who managed to avoid spending any company resources on required government audits, because the cost of the financial penalty is a far less than the cost of complying with the audits.

So perhaps a more chilling question raised, especially for those ethics professors out there, is whether the problem is students cheating on the exam, or is the problem that cheating has become the answer to the question of how to obtain a degree and career success?

Last edited 9 months ago by Daniel Neisess
Daniel Neisess
Reply to  Daniel Neisess
9 months ago

It occurs to me that a fascinating topic for an ethics professor to teach would be one focused solely on cheating. Students at a university must have many varied opinions on the subject. Perhaps as a discussion course to introduce historically significant philosophers, sprinkled in, as the discussion drifts into relevant areas.

You could even do some social experiments, announce that a test on materials covered in class, with the answers available in the same room. See what they do? Does one person grab the test answers before anyone else? Do students form a utilitarian society for a moment and share the answers? Do they spend the whole time debating what to do and run out of time to take the test? Does some diligent student just ignore the fuss and take the exam as normal?

Whatever the result you could discuss it in the next class. See what moral philosophies resonate with the students. Perhaps the students had strong negative feelings about it. Perhaps not.

What if to obtain the answers they must complete a task objectively harder than just learning the material? Like solving a cipher in the short amount of time available?

Perhaps it is cruel, but if you allowed the students the opportunity to discuss the behaviors after the fact, perhaps it is not. Perhaps it encourages self reflection about the act of cheating.

I’m not a professor so feel free to disregard my absurd ideas.

Last edited 9 months ago by Daniel Neisess
BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Roughly half the class not only cheated but didn’t notice the answers were obviously wrong. A class of 100 is not that big. Sounds like the teaching was subpar. In the words of Reddit’s “am I the asshole?”, everybody sucks here.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Why does it sound to you like the teaching is subpar? Here’s an explanation that’s at least as plausible: the students at this university tend not to be effectively deterred from cheating, so it has become a regular practice among them. And what follows from cheating being a regular practice is that there is little incentive to learn: why spend time learning if you intend to cheat at the end?

The point is that, once enough students switch into cheating mode, it’s very difficult to pull them back from the brink. Ploys like the one the professor used here become necessary as a corrective to the neglect of so many others. And yet, you choose to blame the person trying to solve the problem.

I’d love to see how well you do, trying to teach something important and meaningful to a large room full of disaffected, cheating students whose reward systems have been burned out after years of getting through school like this.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Students cheat when the class is boring and the exam structure enables it. A big step in becoming a better professor is realizing this and working on your public speaking and exam design skills.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Are you making a ‘when, and only when’ claim there? Are you actually saying that, if a professor has good public speaking skills, teaches the material well, and designs good exams, none of the students (or at least very few of them) will cheat?

That’s a prima facie implausible empirical claim for which I’d like to see some support.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Are you joking?

Where did I write “when and only when”?

Who sees “A->B” and interprets it as “A<->B”?

Thanks for being a pompous ass 🙂

Last edited 9 months ago by BigProfGuy
Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

So you’re denying the antecedent?

Justin Kalef
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I was trying to be charitable to your comment, which otherwise is a non sequitur.

You wrote: “Students cheat when the class is boring and the exam structure enables it. A big step in becoming a better professor is realizing this and working on your public speaking and exam design skills.

But if all you were saying was that the two conditions (a boring class and an exam structure that enables cheating) is sufficient for students theating, then it does not follow that working on public speaking and exam design skills is a big step in becoming a better professor.

You either straightforwardly committed the fallacy of affirming the consequent, or else you meant to say something you didn’t say and are simply making an empirical claim that seems to need support. Take your pick.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

I guess I’m an idiot 🙂

There are many factors that lead students to cheat. Among these factors are boring classes (that cause students to be disengaged) and poorly designed exams that facilitate cheating. Also among these factors is the “cheating culture” that you are bringing up.

The proportion of students who cheated on Merriam’s exam is staggeringly high, which leads me to believe there are additional factors beyond the “cheating culture” that you are bringing up (which may be minimal or dominant here—we don’t know). It leads me to believe that the responsibility for the problem extends beyond the students and into the professor.

It is the professor’s role to educate the students. The professor is the mature adult in the classroom. Even if most of the “fault” is on the students, I think the professor could have done better in this situation while still achieving a similar goal of reducing cheating.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

What students find “boring” is often the result of their own malformed attitudes, and not always the result of the professor’s quality of teaching. Why do we assume that the student’s knee-jerk judgments are not badly skewed?

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

If 50% of a class thinks your lectures are boring and you think it’s solely due to malformed attitudes, I have a bridge to sell you.

Sean
9 months ago

No, you are not the unethical one… but perhaps you should try to make your tests geared towards encouraging collaboration with technology rather than resisting technology. Technology will grow to be a much more important part of daily life and helping children use it to be better should be the goal. It’s like a bicycle for the mind.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  Sean
9 months ago

Normally I share your general view, but not in this case. If searching quiz answers online was truly the best way of getting accurate information, I would do things differently. Right now the best way is to consult the text or listen to what I’m saying in class. That’s why I tell them googling quiz answers is prohibited – not to play tricky games but because I don’t want them relying on facile, misleading, or even false explanations of philosophical texts. If they choose to cheat anyway, they know it’s wrong and the most important lesson they can learn is that sometimes, dishonesty doesn’t work out well.

If text generators like chat GPT become better at producing accurate and properly sourced answers, I think we should incorporate that capacity into our teaching directly, much like I wouldn’t blame my students for using spell check instead of a dictionary, but would be pleased they spelled the words correctly. I notice high school teachers now have to devise assignments knowing online tools and answers are ready to hand; many have adapted by assuming students can use these things. The same has been more difficult for college level philosophy but that might change. Knowingly copying exam answers from a prohibited source will still be cheating, but the way we think about permitted sources might change radically.

Andrew
9 months ago

What I take away from this is what I take away from basically all professors that require intrusive proctoring software for their students. Don’t give the same exact exam over and over again, especially as a take home exam, and you won’t have a problem with cheating on exams.

It’s 2023, people are encouraged to look up and find the answers to questions they don’t know the answer to. Isn’t that actually kind of the point of a take home exam? And why punish a student who is fast in finding that answer? Poison the well with false answers sure, but don’t also fail them in the whole class

I would be fine with this as a “experiment” kind of thing for an ethics class where the results would be used in the class. Where he posts the false test, then reaches out to the students and then talks about the results about the ethics of confessing to cheating when caught.

Patrick Lin
Reply to  Andrew
9 months ago

I would warn against running such “experiments” and would even avoid that “e-word” in describing what you’ve done, unless you already have IRB approval to run human-subjects research. Ask any psychology or social science professor.

Philosophers might remember this fiasco a few years ago that involved a missing IRB: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/08/author-recent-academic-hoax-faces-disciplinary-action-portland-state

I’m not making a judgment about the merits of that case, only holding it up as an example that universities can be overly sensitive about IRB approvals and that it could be a career-limiting move to run research or experiments on people without IRB review.

Side-bar: IRB reviews can be too greedy or misunderstood by their administrators who ask for one when it’s clearly not needed…which has happened to me recently (I was running a typical academic workshop where participants contribute their expertise to the discussion). I can easily imagine a classroom scenario where some thought experiment could be so jarring or triggering to students that the instructor attracts the attention of administrators.

But discussing a thought experiment in the context of a classroom (i.e., teaching philosophy) is different from conducting research or running experiments on one’s unwitting students with respect to that thought experiment (e.g., merely running a campus survey may require an IRB review or exemption). And I would not trust administrators to arrive at the correct judgment on that distinction, esp. if any students complain about being triggered. Even if you ultimately prevail in that dispute, you don’t want to invite that kind of trouble…

Caligula's Goat
Reply to  Patrick Lin
9 months ago

Unless the professor intends for the results of their experiment to be *published,* then most IRBs that I’m familiar withou wouldn’t consider pedagogical variation to constitute an experiment that falls under their purview (just like having students interview their friends as part of a research paper for a class assignment doesn’t need IRB approval). No need to fear monger here.

The “jarring” or “triggering” example you share with us, while typical of university bureaucratic adminstrative overreach, isn’t something that emerges as a result of IRB problems. That’s an “adminstrators being too liability minded at the expense of learning” mistake.

MrMister
MrMister
Reply to  Caligula's Goat
9 months ago

It isn’t true that an intention to publish is either necessary or sufficient for an activity to count as human subjects research and subject to IRB review; that’s a common misconception (although, pragmatically, you can get away with a lot if you aren’t publishing. Who’s gonna know?).

Still, you are probably correct that most ways of designing Andrew’s “experiment” would not be human subjects research. Per the US federal regulations, research is a systematic investigation designed to develop generalizable knowledge. Boghossian’s hoax was designed to do that, to investigate the difficulty of publishing in a set of journals and thereby measure the quality of the associated fields of study. While I have mixed feelings about whether an ideal system of IRB review would cover his actions, it was not absurd to assimilate them to the paradigmatic human subjects research they resemble. By contrast, using an intervention to attempt to measure and respond to cheating in one’s own classroom would probably be at most quality improvement, or just a pedagogical exercise designed to promote student learning. These are not subject to IRB review, thankfully, as it would be completely paralyzing if they were. While a feckless administrator might respond to student complaints over getting caught cheating by going to an IRB, it would take an exceptionally poor IRB to respond with anything other than a determination that the activity was not research.

I would be more concerned about whether such an exercise violated other university policies, e.g. nebulous clauses about respectful treatment or honor code provisions, as those seem like more promising routes for an administrator to levy punishments if they are determined to do so.

Jeff D.
9 months ago

I don’t have a problem with this. If they weren’t trying to cheat they wouldn’t have been caught cheating. If he hadn’t done this they still would have been trying to cheat, he just ensured they’d find something that made their cheating traceable. If your SO goes to a singles bar and tries to find a one night stand, does them failing make everything ok? If they find someone and do cheat on you, is it ok if it was someone you planted to confirm they were trying to cheat on you? Similarly, if there’s an adult guest in your house and they die from overdosing on medication that you had in your medicine cabinet, is it your fault? Yes, you had it somewhere that this person could find it, sure. But you didn’t tell them to poke through the medicine cabinet, and you certainly didn’t tell them to take your meds.

Those arguing that the instructor did something wrong have, IMO, something seriously wrong with their thinking.

James
9 months ago

What do we have here? A bunch of 18-year-olds year-olds new to university life in a simple lower-level introductory course. An academic policy that is not stated on the syllabus (merely a link). A rather unusual university rule of not looking at past exams when this practice is widely encouraged at other universities. The syllabus chose to not state the academic policy and the ‘no looking at past exams’ rule. Why not? The first day of class the new students are not introduced in the introductory lecture to the academic policy and the ‘no looking at past exams’ rule. Why not?

We have 18-year-olds that are cramming (as if professors don’t cram when they grade papers at the last minute) before a final in an introductory course. An introductory course consisting of the most basic knowledge. ‘What is Utilitarianism?’ What can they do? What are they allowed to do? Form study groups. Consult other textbooks. Go online and find introduction to ethics knowledge everywhere. Hire a tutor. Talk to someone who has taken the course. Go on a website that has quiz flashcards of the subject matter (Quizlet). What are they doing? These young university members are trying to learn.

While in that pursuit they see a past exam which they assume has different questions than the ones which will appear on their exam. Oh wait that was taken down by the professor and in its place is a 2023 course final with fake answers. How is this not honey potting or even entrapment? How do you pervert an 18-year-olds desire to learn into the most extreme desire to cheat?

So many comments on here about the evil students lifelong (when they were minors) desire to cheat and habit of cheating. So many on here want to flunk them. Destroy their GPA. Destroy their acceptance to graduate school or a top job. The punishment is not proportional. Sorry but I think the professor should apologize to his students for his omissions and offer a redo exam. Otherwise there is a serious failure of justice here. Teach virtue and responsibility by example. Teach that universities are places of learning. Not lying. Deception. Gotcha games.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  James
9 months ago

Or maybe he’s doing them a service by teaching a practical lesson: sometimes when you cheat in ways you were explicitly told not to, negative consequences will follow.

T K
T K
Reply to  James
9 months ago

“A rather unusual university rule of not looking at past exams when this practice is widely encouraged at other universities.”

I do not find this rule to be unusual at all. From my high school days until now, I have thought that using old tests was paradigmatical, obvious cheating – especially if I had any reason to think that the future test would look similar to past tests.

On the Market
Reply to  T K
9 months ago

At the college where I did my undergrad, the student union maintains a repository of old exams plus answer keys. Faculty encourage the use of this resource for exam preparation.

One’s mileage might indeed vary here.

T K
T K
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Apparently so. I am curious what others’ thoughts are on this. I have never been a part of a college or university where this was encouraged. What are others’ experiences?

Sam
Sam
Reply to  T K
9 months ago

I’m familiar with the practice of reviewing past exam questions but not exam answers.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  James
9 months ago

Isn’t it a violation of academic integrity to simply copy/paraphrase/memorize an answer that you saw online instead of writing an answer that *you* understand to be correct? It seems that what you are calling “honey potting” is nothing more than a way to show that many students in fact are willing to put down an answer that is blatantly wrong instead of thinking about it for themselves. Poor kids being mistreated!

Mark
9 months ago

I taught HS Physics for a very short period of time to Ninth graders. I was trying to teach them to convert between Imperial pounds and metric kilograms/grams. On a test I told them to use the equivalence of 453grams/pound. Then I had them converting large masses like cars or sack of walnuts. They were not allowed to use their phones but I did supply them with calculators. The actual conversion factor 453.592grams/pound is used on all websites. The students who had the “exact” answers had cheated by using their phone during the test. I failed their test.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Mark
9 months ago

Those students could’ve memorized the correct conversion factor, right?

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

But they didn’t follow the exam instructions……………

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Former Prof
9 months ago

Failing to follow instructions requires an ‘F’ on the exam?

Solve: 3 + x = 6.

If you don’t get the right answer, you failed to solve and thus failed to follow instructions. Did you thereby use your phone? Did you thereby cheat? Do you deserve an automatic ‘F’ on the exam for your failure?

Obviously, the answer to these questions is not necessarily “yes.” Failing to follow instructions doesn’t require an ‘F’.

Laura
Laura
9 months ago

Today I discovered sites like Quizlet and Course hero, thank you! I can’t find much material from my classes but more has been posted from colleagues.

Online quizzes play a lesser role in my courses, but I do Google the questions in advance. Quite often, due to the low quality of specialized philosophy information on sites like Wikipedia, a somewhat confusing or misleading answer or definition appears in top search results. In other cases, the phrasing of the googled answer easily can be adapted to a mistaken answer. I use these to devise wrong answers for multiple choice questions.

I pretend that students who go back to puzzle over why their ace googled answer was wrong will learn something useful in the process. Perhaps a mild sense of wonder then inspires such students to pick up the book or simply listen to me (a constantly flowing fount of correct answers to my own quizzes!). Or perhaps it merely inspires them to find a more sophisticated method of cheating via sites like Quizlet, and without the premium paid subscription, I’ll never know.

Carolyn Allen
9 months ago

I feel that in todays climate, it it important to provide a framework of ethics… especially in an ethics class. If you don’t mind the extra work you could invite the cheaters the option of taking an in class essay test to show that they know the material… or not. Otherwise the rule was there… they should fail an ethics class in which they breach general ethics.

Junior Prof.
9 months ago

A couple of big-picture thoughts based on reading this thread:

(1) It’s hard not to get the impression that many philosophy instructors are allowing or even encouraging their students to treat assignments like an online scavenger hunt for answers. There seems to be a lot of sympathy for “looking up” or even just stumbling across answers and more or less copying them down. It seems to me that what Garret has done is make it harder for those who do this to get away with doing it. Of course, if you think that’s what good philosophy teaching looks like, then… we’ve got bigger problems to address.

(2) It seems like exactly the wrong response to the culture of cheating to try even harder to meet the students’ default expectations of what higher education is about by, for instance, just accepting that this is the new normal and feeling bad for them when they face consequences for cutting corners or outright plagiarizing. How exactly will the culture of cheating ever get better if you don’t start shaping those expectations by setting standards and sticking to them? It isn’t hard to imagine that if enough instructors get serious about cheating, young students taking Intro to Philosophy would also stop expecting to get away with cheating. As it is now, at least in some places, students enter university expecting to be treated with a soft touch in this regard. Supposing this isn’t some kind of irreversible shift in human nature, we could, you know.. do something about it.

Whether or not you agree with all of that, I also think failing to do something about this just imperils the existence of philosophy departments. We already face a growing skepticism about the value of humanities, and specifically philosophy, by university administrators and the general public. The less we take our own discipline’s standards seriously, the less all those people will take it seriously.

Eric Steinhart
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

The general public, which includes students, doesn’t care in the least about the disciplinary standards of philosophy. They only care about whether it makes money. Most of them already regard philosophy as worthless, and I suspect that provides them with justification to cheat.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Eric Steinhart
9 months ago

Will we make progress by conceding to them and effectively making philosophy worthless, conforming to their stupid and uninformed preconceptions, or by reinforcing disciplinary standards?

Eric Steinhart
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

We will make progress by creating entirely new disciplinary standards, and making philosophy worthwhile in new ways.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Eric Steinhart
9 months ago

New ways — that are intended to be compatible with treating people who have thought things through just the same as people who have dishonestly pretended to think things through to earn an undeserved reward???

On The Market
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

If the reward is the education itself, there’s no problem.

Eric Steinhart
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

There are always new ways to serve the eternal ideals of truth and goodness, beauty and justice. If you can’t see that, too bad for you.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Eric Steinhart
9 months ago

I don’t see why the eternal ideals of truth and goodness, beauty and justice are incompatible with giving students a credential based on what they’ve earned.

Which is it: are we giving them a credential or not?

If we’re giving them a credential, then we have to be sure that they’ve earned it.

If no credentials are earned, then I don’t think it matters who cheats. What would they have to gain? But only a tiny fraction of our students would show up, and support us in our work, without it.

Why don’t those of you who don’t want to enforce academic honesty rules arrange for your schools to stop offering certifications, and invite like-minded people to join you there? If the bottom falls out of your side of the profession, the rest of us won’t need to deal with the problems you’ll bring on yourselves.

Eric Steinhart
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Of course we should give students a “credential based on what they’ve earned”. How could you possibly infer that I meant otherwise?

I suspect you are just not paying any attention to anything I say and you just play the tape that’s running in your head.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Eric Steinhart
9 months ago

I’m trying to understand what your position could possibly be. If you agree that students should be given credentials for their achievement in the courses they take, then isn’t it obvious that those who confer those credentials can be sure that the students really did achieve the things they were meant to achieve, and didn’t cheat?

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Sorry, I meant “that those who confer those credentials MUST be sure…”

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Eric Steinhart
9 months ago

Great. I’d love to hear more about that. Will that involve expecting students to do work for themselves, or will that not be one of the new disciplinary standards?

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

Maybe one of the new standards would be to avoid giving take-home multiple choice final exams (and planting false answers online).

Junior Prof.
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I don’t see what the distaste for multiple choice exams has to do with anything here. Does that make it okay for students to look up answers and write them down with essentially zero reflection?

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

You don’t think it’s indicative of lazy and uninspired exam design? Multiple choice is a good option when there is a time constraint and the students are being tested for “recall” knowledge. Are either of those true here? It was a take-home exam.

If we are talking about disciplinary standards to avoid “imperiling the existence of philosophy departments” we should consider how things are being done, from punishing cheaters to creating effective learning environments.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

There are many ways to construct multiple-choice assessments that go far beyond testing recall.

For instance: ‘Given what Philosopher X says in the second half of her book, which of the following claims by Philosopher Y would Philosopher X dispute?’

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Sure but is it the most effective testing tool in that scenario?

Justin Kalef
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I think it could be, yes. We design our courses and assessments against the background of many constraints. Some of them might be imposed by factors like whether one can expect the students to go to campus for an in-person exam (perhaps they signed up for an asynchronous online course). Some of them might be imposed by the department or university.

Others might come from the time constraints on the course. Suppose I am teaching well over one hundred students in all my courses, and am only permitted to give a final examination during the scheduled exam time, but have to turn in all the grades two days later. I would like all those students to submit 5,000 word essays, but I can see that there is no way I could grade them all in time. Another option is to have all the students to take an in-class final exam consisting of two essay questions apiece, but I would have no way to grade those, either, unless I had a bunch of grading assistants, with which my department cannot provide me.

Yet another factor to consider is the skill of the students. Many students today can hardly write a proper sentence, let alone an essay. Clearly, a number of people upstream fell down on the job, but here we are: the professor doesn’t have time to teach both remedial writing and philosophy in the same course. Perhaps she would like to remove the students’ ineptitude at writing from the equation and just grade the students, this time at least, on how well they have understand the nuances of the material. That, again, could make a multiple-choice format preferable.

Still another factor is the professor’s previous experience teaching the course. Perhaps he sees that the students are very good at bullshitting their way through any direct question they are asked, repeating catch-phrases and popular philosophy ideas, and that they have developed this lazy habit because other professors reward it. So they never do their readings or pay attention, relying on their ability to bullshit to save them. One way to wean them off this habit is to ask them true/false or multiple-choice questions: you can’t bullshit your way through those, and the professor can demonstrate that certain answers are false, and therefore deserve a score of zero. Letting students know that a final exam will have this format will make it clear to them that preparing to bullshit will not be effective.

One final consideration I’ll mention — but hardly the only remaining one — is technological. More or less any essay question, or short answer question, can easily be hacked by online learners by feeding the question into Chat-GPT and then cutting and pasting the answer into the exam. But multiple-choice questions can be written in such a way that Chat-GPT’s answers are worthless.

So, yes, there are many reasons why a well-designed multiple-choice exam might be the most effective way for a professor to assess students at the end of a given course.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I haven’t said anything at all about whether it is uninspired or indicative of laziness, or not, precisely because I think it’s beside the point (as I said).

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

I must have misunderstood then. It was my impression that you were worried about the future of philosophy departments.

I think if most philosophy professors took a lazy and uninspired approach to designing exams, this would contribute to the downfall you are worried about.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Multiple choice exams given online don’t have to be lazy and uninspired in design. I don’t expect my students to have perfect recall of the course content in 10 or 20 years, but I do expect them to start from an informed baseline and know how to look up the arguments, think them through, and answer questions that depend on knowing how they work. Most LMS tools allow analysis of multiple choice exams, helping window out ineffective questions.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

I think it is quite lazy. It is the simple transfer of an in-person examination method to the online modality. If nothing is done to consider the differences of an online vs in-person course, then it is absolutely lazy and uninspired. If it’s not lazy, where’s the effort? If it’s not uninspired, where’s the creativity?

Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I suggest starting from a different set of assumptions. It might not be a lazy transfer of in-person multiple choice format straight to the online format without rethinking. Why would we assume this?

Last edited 9 months ago by Laura
Stewart Rood
9 months ago

Quizlet is one of an expanding number of on-line resources that are intended to assist with high school and college learning. These are reportedly accessed by as many as one-third of college students and are allowed and even encouraged by some instructors and programs.

The posting of prior exams is the digital version of exam registries, which were often openly hosted by student unions. This ‘levels the field’ since a student with a sibling or friend who’d taken a course could have access to the prior course materials, including exams. The exam registry allows all students to access at least the blank exams.

In my view, exams are not just for assessment but are part of the learning process and the graded exams should be returned. With this practice, exams should be developed or at least revised for each course offering. And if a student is capable with the content from a half-dozen exams, they would have a strong understanding of the course content.

So, I regard this case as not just entrapment but as fraud, with the deliberate provision of incorrect answers. And to some posters who refer to their experience from long ago, the digital era has changed college instruction – and even more so with the widespread transition to virtual courses through the Pandemic. Welcome to the 21st century.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Stewart Rood
9 months ago

Do you expect the students who study these exams to be capable of justifying their answers with their own understanding of the material?

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Stewart Rood
9 months ago

Intended by whom “to assist with high school and college learning”?

Exam registries are (in many schools/courses) a form of cheating, and so are digital versions of them. There is no value in “leveling the field” to make it easier for all people to engage in misconduct.

Yes, exams are part of the learning process. But that doesn’t entail that they should be returned. I go over them in class without returning them, for example.

“So, I regard this case as not just entrapment but as fraud”. This doesn’t follow from the claims you’ve made, nor from any other (plausible) claims that come to mind.

On The Market
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

A quick google search for “exam registry” and “exam bank” returns many repositories of past exams, often hosted by student unions or universities themselves.

This is just to reiterate that I am as flabbergasted at the suggestion that using old exams to study is a “form of cheating” as I surmise you are at the suggestion that they are useful learning tools.

First-year undergraduates in particular are often uncertain about how they are evaluated. I can’t conceive of a reason why it would be illegitimate for them to look up a past exam, to get an idea of what is expected, do a practice run to see how they are doing on time, and so on.

It seems to me that any prohibition on exam banks is an active impediment to student success. And for what? So that we can reuse exams?

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

I can’t tell for sure, but it seems like you are thinking about things in a very black and white way. I give my students a comprehensive study guide, I tell them the structure of the exam, etc. In some classes I provide them with practice/sample exams! I don’t doubt that going over past exams can be a useful learning tool. But if sharing past exams is prohibited, it’s also a form of cheating. The reason it is illegitimate is simply that it is prohibited. (If it isn’t prohibited, it obviously isn’t illegitimate. Some assignments are group assignments, others aren’t etc.) But furthermore, my own view is that sharing past exams should be prohibited. If the prof wants to provide past/sample/practice exams, great. I agree that is helpful. But students sharing past exams with each other creates significant inequities and the possibility of confusion (e.g., if they look an unrepresentative past exam).

On The Market
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

“But if sharing past exams is prohibited, it’s also a form of cheating. The reason it is illegitimate is simply that it is prohibited. (If it isn’t prohibited, it obviously isn’t illegitimate.”

I took myself to be arguing from a moral position, hence the mere existence of a prohibition is not a reason for me to regard something as illegitimate. You seem to take a legal positivist stance on this, so our disagreement is merely verbal.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

I’m certainly not a legal positivist! But set that aside: I’m honestly puzzled by your position here. It seems sorta like you’re suggesting that what’s “illegitimate” in a class is independent of the rules set forth by the teacher. That can’t actually be your view, can it? I mean, if I prohibit sharing/looking at past exams in my courses, and some people do it anyway, they’d have a significant unfair advantage, right? And isn’t taking a significant unfair advantage illegitimate, if not wrong?

On the Market
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

You seem to think we’re discussing the moral status of a student who violates a prohibition on exam sharing, whereas I was saying that I don’t see a good moral reason for instituting such a prohibition.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

What’s the good reason to permit studying old exams? Only some students will gain access, so in fact they’d have a potential unfair advantage. All the students have access to the same notes from which those exam questions are drawn. It isn’t difficult to determine that you will need to explain the ways Bentham and Mill are different, or the way Kantian deontology differs from both of them. What information do the students glean from exams that they couldn’t already obtain incredibly easily, besides knowing which of the answer choices on a multiple choice question was correct? You can switch it up but you’re still going to include the same kinds of questions about Bentham, Mill, and Kant.

On The Market
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

I believe I said this above: students, especially first years, are unsure and anxious about the exams. Having past exams available for study and for practice alleviates this quite a bit. I agree that providing sample and practice exams is a good strategy here as well.

Your worry is easily addressed by making old exams officially available, as many universities do (also see the comment of “Euro” upthread). If you scroll up, you’ll see that I’ve advocated for exam banks, i.e. the equitable and universal availability of past exams.

On balance, I think it is glaringly obvious that between the following two options, the first is morally preferable:

i. be more permissive and eliminate the potential for inequalities by being even more permissive

ii. institute a difficult to enforce prohibition and eliminate the potential for violations by increasing surveillance, trickery, authoritarian interventions etc.

Also pragmatically, the latter option is engaged in (and badly losing) an on-going arms race against technology, whereas the former is not.

Regardless, it was far from my intent here to engage in a foundational debate on the ethics of exam banks. I just wanted to highlight that it is not so that looking at old exams is obviously and universally cheating.

Since that opinion was voiced more than once, I merely wanted to register the alternative.

Last edited 9 months ago by On The Market
Justin Kalef
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

You write:

On balance, I think it is glaringly obvious that between the following two options, the first is morally preferable:
i. be more permissive and eliminate the potential for inequalities by being even more permissive
ii. institute a difficult to enforce prohibition and eliminate the potential for violations by increasing surveillance, trickery, authoritarian interventions etc.

I wonder how you deal with this reductio: the best way to reduce anxiety about exams and ensure that there is no ‘potential for inequalities’ is to make sure that everyone who takes the course gets the same grade, and that that grade will be a good one. So, why not just give every student 100%? Even better, tell them in advance that they will have 100%.

Actually, some students will have excuses for not coming to the exam, or for being particularly anxious just about the obligation to show up to the exam (even if it’s online), and perhaps those factors will have a disparate effect, further promoting unequal results. And we don’t want to be ‘authoritarian’ and demand evidence for excuses, do we?

The solution that immediately presents itself, following your reasoning, is to give everyone the highest possible grade in the course, just for registering in the class, and to let them know this at the beginning.

That way, there’s no anxiety, no potential for inequality, no authoritarian practices, no surveilance, and no trickery. Students merely purchase their grade as part of the tuition fees they fork over.

Do you accept that consequence? If not, why not? I’m really beginning to wonder.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

The premise “the best way to…” is false and apparently misses the point. Given the explanation following the “reductio,” the premise appears to concern unequal exam results, or unequal course grades, or inequalities more generally. But the inequalities referenced in Laura’s first option concern unequal access to study materials or, more specifically, past exams. The “reductio” fails.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I meant On The Market’s first option, not Laura’s.

Last edited 9 months ago by Sam
Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I took ‘On the Market’ to be making a general claim.

On The Market
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

You do tend to “take me” to make all sorts of claims.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

It should be obvious that the claim was not a general claim, because the two paragraphs immediately preceding the one you quote explicitly support making exams equitably and universally available to study.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

Exactly. Over the semester I consistently tell my students things like: “this is the sort of question you should be able to write an answer to on an exam”, and “in order to do well on the exam, you will need to pay attention to x, y, z.” I assume most every instructor does this. There should be no serious confusion about what to expect on the exam, and if the students pay attention then there should be a pretty clear path to studying.

On The Market
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

Perhaps there should and I don’t doubt you (and most of us) provide all the information they need, but the question is whether there is.

I take an “is” over a “should” any day, and I found time and again that it helps the kids immensely, if only psychologically, to see an example of a concrete exam.

Last edited 9 months ago by On The Market
JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

I at least agree that it is valuable to see a concrete example of an exam. Hence, depending on how significant exams are in the course, I provide sample/practice exams before each exam, or provide study guides and have 4+ exams so students can get acclimated to them. If you are changing you exam anyways, I think the prof providing a sample exam is preferable to exam banks both for the reasons given above (exam banks are inequitable, and may be misleading), but also because once exam banks are allowed it is hard to draw a bright line that forbids essay banks. And essay banks are a horrible occasion of sin, as the Catholics say. So if the prof is responsible, they should provide a practice exam or some sort of other detailed description of what the exam will be like. Of course, not all profs are responsible. But if the prof hasn’t distributed a practice exam (or equivalent) or said that students are welcome to access Quizlet (etc.), then the worries about inequity and confusion come back full force. So, by my lights, the only case where looking at old exams not distributed by the prof is permissible is a case where the prof has allowed it but not provided specific old exams to look at. This seems (a) likely to be very rare, and (b) not relevant to the original case or many of the other cases that have come up here.

On the Market
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

fwiw, I agree that practice or sample exams are equally good.

I continue to be confused about the resistance to exam banks, eg I definitely don’t take this to be a “forbidden unless explicitly allowed” matter. I figure one’s assessment largely depends on what one is used to (myself included).

Certainly, however, it is not reasonable to expect people to know they’re not supposed to look up old exams without being explicitly told do.

Last edited 9 months ago by On the Market
Junior Prof.
Reply to  On The Market
9 months ago

In my own experience, students have become more and more “anxious” about things like philosophy exams (particularly in-class exams). But that anxiety is due at least in part, and I suspect in large part, to their experience of having fewer and fewer assignments that require them to be individually responsible for the course material.

It may sound very “kids these days!” to some, but it’s just true. Lots of young students expect to be spoon-fed, because they often are spoon-fed. That isn’t just some natural quality of being a university student; it’s something we have a large role in creating, and we can also change it. I don’t remember, even ten years ago, so many students being terrified at the prospect of an in-class exam. This is something that is getting worse, and it’s not hard to see why.

On the Market
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

Everything I said is based on experience going back to my own undergrad, well over 10 years ago. So I do think there’s a lot of “kids these days” going on.

Regardless, I won’t and can’t be convinced that anything beats kindness. I hope we can spare each other the “tough love” discourse.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Ten years is not a long time. Many others here have experienced academia as it began to transform many decades ago, likely before you were born, if you’re on the market now. This has been a long time coming.

On the Market
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

The person I responded to said something about “ten years ago” so I responded to that.

It is really, really not fun, productive, or helpful to argue with someone who appears to be determined to ignore context.

I don’t understand why you seem to pursue this as a strategy. If you just want to score points, please do it with someone else.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  On the Market
9 months ago

Unfortunately, at least ten of my comments in this thread have been blocked by Justin Weinberg. I think all of them have been direct responses to On The Market.

I don’t understand why that should be the policy. I am, after all, here under my own name, not hiding behind a pseudonym, and yet readers will get the impression that On The Market’s points are much stronger than they are. On The Market’s comments against me are also, and routinely, far worse than anything I have said about On The Market. And yet, those comments by On The Market continue to appear here.

There is much I could say about the inaccuracy of On The Market’s comments, and the level of maturity exhibited by their writer. But I have little doubt that, if I did so, those comments, also, would be blocked.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

At least one of On The Market’s comments was removed. I saw it and “liked” it, and then it was gone a few minutes later. It wasn’t rude or insulting, but it would likely have cause you to be offended. And it didn’t contribute to advancing the conversation in any way.

I’m not sure what you believe the policy to be, but it could be a policy of removing comments that would likely cause offense, but only when they are obviously insulting or fail to contribute to advancing the conversation.

I don’t see why your using your real name should make a difference as to whether you are allowed to cause offense, even when some who don’t use their real names are allowed. I know, I know: there’s an imbalance in the damage to reputation…It’s just that I don’t know why such an imbalance should matter. You are, after all, free to comment under a pseudonym if the likelihood of reputational damage is such a big deal to you.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

It seems that you misunderstand my point and my intentions here, Sam.

When people come here under their own names and say offensive things to me and about me, I seem only to benefit in the end, while they take a hit to their reputations. Far be it from me to argue that those who attack me should be deprived a rope they use to hang themselves.

My point was, rather, that it seems odd (and contrary to the ends of productive discussion) to eliminate so many of my comments, which make constructive moves within the discussion while saying something critical about this unknown On The Market person, while permitting On The Market to keep taking these preposterous swipes at me.

I think it’s sometimes reasonable to permit people to contribute under pseudonyms. At times, during a social panic especially, readers can be so inane and so vindictive toward anyone who advances a contrary view that pseudonymous contributions are the only way one side of the conversation can be heard at all.

But allowing pseudonymous contributors requires a kind of vigilance toward them, since the embarrassment of being caught saying blatantly false things, or contradicting oneself, or misrepresenting others, is a source of shame. The threat of reputational harm helps to keep people honest. When they are not honest, they suffer the consequences, which can also provide a sort of lesson for the next time.

But On The Market is using the crude tactic of dodging every refutation and correction of his errors by (very smugly) claiming that his interlocutors have misread him. He has done this over and over again, in the face of the clearest refutations and exposures of his blatant contradictions. And why not? On The Market is here under a pseudonym. The cost of doing this is zero, provided that one is lacking in self-honesty or intellectual integrity. It’s in just these situations that the risk of reputational harm can make up for someone’s intellectual vices or deficiencies. It seems quite possible that On The Market sincerely believes himself to be in the right here, and effortlessly forgets and ignores all the points on which he has been shown to be wrong.

Any mildly attentive person who has followed On The Market’s exchanges with me and everyone else will see what is going on here. But how many people will read all the way through a comments section as long as this one? And this provides an effective but dishonest tactic to anyone in On The Market’s position: just doggedly hold the line in the face of all refutations, conceding nothing, and then go further and engage aggressively, condescendingly insulting everyone you have engaged with while misrepresenting everything to your advantage, however wildly you like. Probably, most people reading the comments at that point will have no idea what happened earlier, and will assume that anyone who takes on a position as haughty and sneering as On The Market’s must be at least partly right.

My suggestion for these cases: first, the need to allow pseudonymous contributions must depend on how credible a danger it is to make comments from a particular side. On The Market’s position (that we should be very lenient toward cheats or suspected cheats) is, if anything, the mainstream view in academia. It’s hard to see what grounds there are for allowing a pseudonymous contribution here.

Second, if one decides to let pseudonyous people join a discussion, one should keep close track of whether they are engaging fairly or resorting to well-known dodges that can only be prevented by the risk of reputational damage. While such people should not be outed for engaging in those crude tactics, at least they should be told that they must switch to their own identities if they want to continue.

Third, if there’s an exchange between two people, one armed with a pseudonym and one unarmed, it should be the attacks on the credibility of the unarmed person that should be checked, not the reverse, which is what happened here.

Finally, it’s true that I could have chosen to engage under a pseudonym as well, but I didn’t think it would be necessary. Justin Weinberg, years ago, moderated things quite heavily, but has become more permissive in more recent years. I therefore didn’t expect that any of this would happen or that I would have any reason to use a pseudonym.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Thanks for the reply. I agree that using real names can help to keep commentators honest. But I don’t agree that On The Market has engaged in intellectual dishonesty in this thread, and it seems to me fairly clear that you’ve agregiously misinterpreted comments on a number of occasions (and not just in this discussion).

Regarding your first suggestion: It’s not clear to me that leniency for cheaters is the mainstream view in academia or within philosophy. Judging by the comments here, I’d get the opposite impression. But I admit I don’t know or care what the mainstream view is.

Regarding the second suggestion: I understand why someone might hold your view. It is, however, important to remind ourselves that it’s often difficult to judge whether someone is engaging in the sorts of intellectual dishonesty you attribute to On The Market. And reasonable people can disagree about particular cases. (You and I disagree about On The Market, and I hope you’ll agree that I’m a reasonable person!)

Regarding your third suggestion: I understand why someone might hold your view. But it seems to me that attacks on the credibility of the named should be allowed (even when someone who is pseudonymous is the attacker) if the credibility of the named should be questioned. Perhaps the moderator judged (with me) that some of On The Market’s criticisms of you in this thread were justified, and that your credibility in this thread should be questioned. That could explain why your comments were blocked and some of On The Market’s were not.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I think that most of the people who have taken part in this discussion have noted that On The Market’s comments are extreme and also that On The Market has been caught in some blatant contradictions. You, apparently disagree, but you seem to be in the minority. However, as you admit, you don’t care whether this is so, and this is a matter of objective truth, not popularity.

I think it would be very surprising if Justin Weinberg decided to delete comments of mine merely because he found that what I say is implausible. That just isn’t his style, nor should it be. And he has allowed people to say all sorts of bizarre things here, including (for instance) that cancer never existed until people believed that it existed.

I think the view that we have no need to fight against plagiarism, including at the very least faliing students who plagiarize, is pretty ridiculous, and that the more extreme views you seem to endorse is clearly implausible. But rather than make that case here, where hardly anyone will find it buried deep in the comments, I intend to write something of greater length fairly soon.

I don’t have a clear view about whether On The Market is doing this on purpose or not. I suspect it may be a case of error resulting from deep epistemic vices, rather than malice.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

“I think it would be very surprising if Justin Weinberg decided to delete comments of mine merely because he found that what I say is implausible.”

I’m not sure what you think I said in my remarks about your third suggestion. I’m certainly not saying that your comments might have been blocked because they were implausible. Rather, I’m saying:

1. Your credibility here should have been questioned because of your failures to comprehend and accurately interpret clear prose.

2. On The Market’s attacks on your credibility (via criticisms of you in comments) were justified because of the failures just mentioned.

3. A good explanation for why your comments were blocked is that the moderator agrees with (1) and (2).

“You, apparently disagree, but you seem to be in the minority.”

I would probably care whether I’m in the minority of commentators on DN if I thought highly of the majority of commentators on DN. But I don’t think highly of them.

“But rather than make that case here, where hardly anyone will find it buried deep in the comments, I intend to write something of greater length fairly soon.”

Where will I be able to find this writing? Which venue will give it more exposure than a publicly available discussion here on the very topic? I hope you’ll answer these questions, as I’d be happy to have the opportunity to criticize it when it appears.

Justin Kalef
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

On The Market’s claims that I misunderstood what he said are laughable, as I repeatedly explained (though some of my comments were blocked). The matter is clear enough to anyone who read the exchanges carefully that I won’t waste more time explaining this, since it would just lead to an endless cycle of silly comments claiming that I misunderstood the claims that I misunderstood the claims, and so on forever. It’s a fool’s game to play, and I’m done with it. Again, the record is here for anyone who for some reason cares to wade through it.

Anyone who claims that I “failed to comprehend and accurately interpret clear prose” is probably either On The Market or else was influenced by the bold claims made by On The Market, all of which come to nothing (which, again, I was unable to demonstrate because some of my comments were blocked, but really any mildly intelligent person reviewing On The Market’s charges with a fair mind should be able to see quite easily what is going on.

Based on the fact that you make just that claim, I can’t truthfully say that I anticipate much of value in your critical comments. However, you will have your chance to offer them, since I intend to publish that item I mentioned here on Daily Nous. (Justin Weinberg has indicated that he would be interested in publishing it here if it looks good to him when I’ve had a chance to write it up and submit it).

I do hope that, if and when that happens, you will at least post comments under your own full name, so that what you say will be assessed by your peers just as what I say will be. Again, I think that having your reputation on the line will help you be a bit more circumspect in the conclusions you draw (or are primed to draw).

That’s it for me. Take care.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

“Anyone who claims that I ‘failed to comprehend and accurately interpret clear prose’ is probably either On The Market or else was influenced by the bold claims made by On The Market…”

In this thread, I claimed that you failed to comprehend and accurately interpret On The Market’s point regarding making past exams available for students to study, a point made using clear prose. Yet, I’m neither On The Market nor influenced by On The Market’s claims.

“Based on the fact that you make just that claim, I can’t truthfully say that I anticipate much of value in your critical comments.”

Since you’ve apparently been incapable of appreciating the value of my comments here (and elsewhere), I’m not sure you’d be capable of appreciating any value my critical comments of your writing might have.

“I do hope that, if and when that happens, you will at least post comments under your own full name, so that what you say will be assessed by your peers just as what I say will be.”

Most of my peers don’t waste much time reading DN commentary. Most are serious people who, unlike me, have no penchant for exposing the folly of mediocrity.

As far as I can tell, the only value in using my own full name would be that you and others would be more likely to take seriously what I write and be wary of misinterpreting (or pretending to misinterpret) what I write. I think my using a pseudonym makes you and others more inclined to exhibit your folly. Remaining pseudonymous is probably better for the profession, for reasons that will become clearer after my next point.

“Again, I think that having your reputation on the line will help you be a bit more circumspect in the conclusions you draw (or are primed to draw).”

Having your reputation on the line hasn’t helped you avoid negative consequences of your commentary. You have been exposed for what you are (by me and by others), and many opportunities will be rightly withheld because of it.

Relatedly, I think it somewhat unlikely that what you’re planning to write will show up on DN. (I recall that in a comment in a prior DN discussion, you said you’d be writing up something on women in philosophy, and it appeared nowhere, as far as I know.) In the unlikely event that what you’re planning to write is published here, I’ll be happy to demonstrate its inadequacies and the inadequacies of your responses to comments. Good luck!

On The Market
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

Thank you, Sam.

On The Market
Reply to  Justin Kalef
9 months ago

Justin, you may note that I haven’t claimed of anyone else that they systematically and unreasonably misrepresent my clearly stated views; but more people than just me have claimed that you systematically and unreasonably misrepresent their clearly stated views (e.g. Eric Steinhart upthread). On balance, this makes me confident in my epistemic position.

This whole interaction, by the way, vindicates my choice to remain anonymous. On any matter of moral or professional significance, there is no view widespread or milquetoast enough that it won’t face aggressive pushback from some more established people.

Stewart Rood
Reply to  JDRox
9 months ago

Fraud is generally regarded as purposeful deception, which is admitted.

JDRox
JDRox
Reply to  Stewart Rood
9 months ago

If ‘fraud’ is defined as mere purposeful deception, then it is often morally permissible, and perhaps obligatory, which negates your suggestion above that it is something worse than entrapment.

BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I dislike how the article begins with “All I did was…” I can’t help but read it in a whiny voice. It screams of victim mentality to me.

All I did was…” But what about all the things you didn’t do? Did you, at any point, have a serious conversation with your students about cheating? Did you motivate and inspire your students to learn the material? Did you give them study tips and / or study guides? Did you give them tips to properly handle an asynchronous online class? Did you design an exam that you truly believe is fair and properly guarded against cheating?

Why was the take-home exam multiple choice? Multiple choice exams are effective when there is a lot of material to be tested in a short amount of time and when testing the students “recall knowledge” is sufficient. Was multiple choice really the best option for a philosophy’s asynchronous online take-home final exam?

Now you feel uneasy about what you did and are looking for validation. I think you chose the low road and are desperately looking for ways to justify it. I could be horribly wrong—I’m not trying to assume but to give you food for thought.

I completely agree that cheating deteriorates the learning environment and devalues honest students’ achievements. But by punishing the cheaters using this trickery I am certain you broke the trust of even the honest students. Nobody feels good in a learning environment built on mistrust and trickery. Be upfront, honest, firm, and strong. Be creative in solving this problem in the future by communicating clearly with your students and creating assignments and exams that aren’t easily Googled.

For what it’s worth… I don’t think you’re a hero. I also don’t think you’re terrible. But I do think you chose a cowardly route here.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

This seems like an awful lot of judgment based on unfounded assumptions. I do all the things you mention above as good practices and still people will cheat. It would be kind of you to present us with good assignments for an intro ethics course that meet these standards, yet can be graded within the finals deadline for 200 students.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

This is food for Garret’s thought. If he thinks none of what I said is true or applicable, great. Only he truly knows.

None of us in these comments have access to all the data and facts to properly analyze what happened. Throughout these comments are several unfounded assumptions.

Are you saying that a take-home multiple choice final that is mostly a rehash of previous exams is properly safeguarded against cheating? Are you telling me that you are unable to think of another way to give a final exam to an online ethics class beyond this lazy multiple choice option and you are therefore asking me to come up with better examples of good assignments?

Preston Stovall
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Whatever else she’s said, Laura’s issued a request: that you, or others toeing this line, produce some examples of assignments that meet these standards. I second that request.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Preston Stovall
9 months ago

One can capitalize on several aspects of the asynchronous modality. I don’t know the details of Garret’s class structure but I think a fully online class should be structured quite differently than an in-person class. Hence, providing the example you are requesting requires rethinking the entire class, assignment, and exam structure. A “traditional” final could very well be avoided (and I’m sure most departments would approve) in the sense that it could be administered early (to give more time to grade).

There’s a 3 or 4-day window to grade finals? Is it an in-person class? If so, though not ideal, sure, administer the multiple choice exam (though, still, I believe better options exist). Is it an online class? If so, have some good judgment and understand that multiple choice exams are not ideal in this scenario and are not safeguarded against cheating (especially if rehashing old questions). A final project could replace the final exam and could be made due well before the final exam date, increasing the amount of time available to grade.

I think the examples you are asking for fall more into “online class design” rather than the design of a single assignment. An exam or assignment doesn’t exist in isolation.

State School Prof
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

What sort of final project would be good for an online, asynchronous class for a gen ed in which most students simply will not be interested in the subject, no matter what? (This is not a snarky question. I am genuinely curious, as I am currently scheduled to teach such a class next year.)

Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Why would I be saying or telling you either of those wacky things? It’s easy to think up good assignments; it’s harder to administer and grade them for hundreds of students in a short time period. It would be a service to help the people, since you know.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Laura
9 months ago

You speak as if universities don’t have guidelines for creating fair exams for asynchronous online classes. A quick Google search reveals several such guidelines, where pros and cons of various exam methods are discussed, and where additional measures to ensure academic integrity in remote modalities are outlined. This “service to the people” is already out there.

Laura
Laura
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

Initially you asked many questions about what Garrett “didn’t do”, and implied he should choose more fair and safeguarded methods of assessing online courses. When asked what these might be, when one has to grade hundreds of students in a short time period, your answer is that we should Google whatever advice universities might have posted online, or assign final projects of an unspecified kind. What would these final projects be like? One traditional option is to assign a paper, but it will be even easier for students to cheat on that assignment with AI assistance, while dramatically expanding the time it takes to grade 100 submissions. So I’m genuinely curious about what kind of projects you have in mind. As a target, suppose the project takes 15 minutes to grade, or 1500 for the whole class, for which you’d need to budget about three normal working days or two long days for grading, per 100 person section.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  BigProfGuy
9 months ago

I don’t see why there is so much focus on whether the assignment was properly safeguarded against cheating. Is the suggestion that the less safeguarded it is, the more permissible cheating becomes? Are you saying that we shouldn’t enforce rules about cheating unless we have done absolutely everything possible to make a cheat-proof assignment? Surely the problems with this reasoning are fairly apparent.

BigProfGuy
Reply to  Junior Prof.
9 months ago

I think this is a really important and interesting issue. But we all do take some measures (e.g., having empty seats between students, not allowing use of cell phones, etc). Should we not? Should we always present or allow the option to easily cheat? Do we not have a duty to minimize temptations and encourage, instead, honest work?

Rob Dinsmore
Rob Dinsmore
9 months ago

For the cheaters, did you do any analysis on their performance on the rest of the questions? If they did well on those questions and would have passed if not for this experiment, would this change your view on what you did at all?

Michael Leue
9 months ago

First, Merriam said he wasn’t a forensic mathematician, which suggests we shouldn’t be placing a ton of emphasis on his conclusions, as they may be wrong. Second, he said that he doesn’t want to do this and would rather be grading, which points to the fact that this project isn’t really the role of a teacher or professor in the first place. Third, the fact that almost half of an *ethics* class was caught in this net suggests that, even if this specific project wasn’t an encouragement to cheat, *something* about the class’s construction is. I’ll present, as one possibility, the fact that the test is in a multiple choice format, which just seems ripe for abuse.

I don’t necessarily think setting this sort of “camera” is a problem for someone to do. I think maybe it’s a problem for a professor specifically to do, though, because it creates an adversarial relationship between teacher and cheater that ideally wouldn’t exist. A possible solution is to offload this responsibility onto a department-based team with the mandate of discovering and managing the degree of cheating going on. Another possible solution is to use the carrot and not the stick to create positive incentives to avoid cheating, such as testless instruction.

naive squirrel
9 months ago

Here’s my argument against the accusation of entrapment: entrapment involves a kind of lure, to get the potential wrong-doer (who might otherwise not have done wrong) to be (more) inclined to act wrongly. But the students in question were already sufficiently inclined to act wrongly – they met the threshold for punishment as soon as they approached the web for answers. If the professor had planted (in addition to the obviously wrong answers on Quizlet) say, an undercover aide to pose as a students offering tips for how to cheat, directing them to the source of the bad answers, then *that* would be entrapment.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  naive squirrel
9 months ago

Your argument fails if it is intended to apply to all the relevant students. Some might not have gone to the website for answers and might have been insufficiently inclined to act wrongly upon getting to the site (e.g., because they planned to use the site simply for study materials). For them, upon getting there, they might have seen the fake exam answers and been made more inclined to act wrongly.

Former Prof
Former Prof
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

If your goal is to find study materials for a subject you have spent a semester interacting with and you do not understand the answer, why would ANYONE just memorize it? It makes perfect sense to seek out test questions and interact with them. It is a great way to study. When you do not understand how to derive the answer that is marked correct, why not do some reading and research. If someone tells me something I do not believe to be correct, I ask questions. So should students if they want any value from their education.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  Former Prof
9 months ago

What claim or point that I made is this intended to dispute?

naive squirrel
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I think Former Prof may be suggesting that Quizlet is not really an appropriate tool for actual learning (vs. mere studying by memorizing things) and that students should have been wise enough to detect the false answers in so far as they would not have been able to understand how to derive the answer (so they were not taking the material in critically – just at face value – and that is the problem)

Sam
Sam
Reply to  naive squirrel
9 months ago

Thanks, that seems right to me. I was just wondering why this comment would be directed at my comment to you. In other words, my point isn’t in any way weakened by the purported fact that students were there to study for bad reasons, or whether they shouldn’t have been there to study. All that matters is whether they were there with the intention to study, and without the intention to cheat.

Also, I’m not in any way defending their being there, or their reasons for being there to study. I’m simply offering an explanation of their being there, one which is inconsistent with the presumption that all were there to cheat.

naive squirrel
Reply to  Sam
9 months ago

I suppose if the professor is somehow particularly bad at providing ample study materials through the course content itself, I’m not sure I understand why we should be expecting or encouraging students to innocently use a dubious online resource to help them pass an exam. And maybe some people think the resource is perfectly appropriate. Either way, it seems that students are either (1) cutting corners or (2) so deprived of quality instruction over the semester, that they had no choice but to defer to the web. I tend to think (1) is more likely to be the case.

Sam
Sam
Reply to  naive squirrel
9 months ago

I tend to agree with you. But we shouldn’t expect *all* students who cheated in this case to have gone to the website with the intent to cheat, especially since many commentators here have provided reason to believe that many students believe the website to be , and use it as, a study resource.

non-academic medic
9 months ago

How was the decoy paper labelled? Was it lalbelled as a leaked version of the upcoming test, or as a past-paper, or a specemin paper, or practice paper or something else? If a past-paper, are the students subject to rules to say they musn’t look at any past papers they come across?

During my higher education (in medicine, not philosophy, and in the UK) the medical school would release past/specemin papers, there were generally a couple availble. But other verstions of these specemin papers that had previously been made available were also circulated amongst the student body, and it wasn’t considered cheating to look at these. One or two questions identical (or sometimes just very similar to) past/specemin paper questions usually featured each real exam paper. This was true for both the then-officially provided past papers as well as the older copies in circulation.

These past papers were intended to help students prepare for the format of the exam, timings etc. Obviously, doing the questions was also a form of revision – you would look at the answers and learn from your mistakes. Our exams were sat in invigilated exam halls so any learning done this way had to be memorised. Most commercial revision materials used to study for medical exams were also in “practice paper” format, and most people revised by doing lots and lots and lots of exam-style questions.

Whilst it sounds like the students described in the post were guilty of cheating, theoretically, if students had come across this paper, might they have thought it was a past paper that was legitimate fair-game as a revision resource? And in doing so adjusted their prevoius knowledge based on it, and then got the exam wrong? They may have theoretically completed the exam thinking “oh, they’ve re-used an old paper that I used in my revision, that was careless of them and makes the test easy for me” without having originally inteded to cheat. One might argue it would still be incumbent on them to make it known that they have inadvertently gained an unfair advantage, but that is a different, higher expectation of them than not intentionally cheating.

Again, I appreciate this probably doesn’t describe the students in question. But isn’t “poisoning the well” risky for this reason? What about future students or students from another instituion who might come across this paper and decide to use it for studying purposes? Perhaps the fake answers are so outrageous that any student ought to be able to detect them. But nevertheless it could still be confusing for them and potentially stymie their learning. Obviously anybody could make a distribute a wrong-answered, fake exam paper, but arguably academic/teachers should be more interested in potential negative consequences for learning of doing so.

Junior Prof.
Reply to  non-academic medic
9 months ago

I think the whole approach that Prof. Merriam is taking is predicated on the idea (which I find to be sound) that studying for any exam in philosophy should involve making sure that you give the right answers for the right reasons. If so, then these sites are not actually for studying philosophy; they are tools for cutting corners, to put it nicely. Of course, we haven’t seen all the questions on the fake exam. But if he is to be believed, it sounds like the fake answers should have been pretty easily detected by students who paid attention and digested the course material properly. The fact that students just regurgitated those fake answers shows that they used the site simply to copy the answers, and hence that they went in with the intention to cheat.

Alyssa Michaud
9 months ago

You are not unethical but you aren’t being ethical either! Wrong information is wrong information and should not be published online for anyone to misinterpret – thats another issue beyond cheating on tests. It needs to be done. I am a non traditional student (31 years old) these students are straight up graduating and NEVER reading. Not all of them but a lot of them. It is very concerning. Its one thing to read the book and look things up but some students are sliding by completely relying on quizlet and other websites.

Julien
9 months ago

I think it is an interesting experiment. I studied a lot at university and end up teaching for some time, so I know the problems with cheating.

The first thing I would say is that this experiment does not actually show who cheated or not. The professor assumes that only the ones who failed cheated, while it is possible that many who passed the exam did also. Among those who passed, some might have found the exam, figured out some answers were wrong and worked out the right answers by themselves or with other students. Of course, these students proved that they understood the questions, but that does not mean that they would have passed the exam without having the questions prior. Furthermore, if they worked in groups, it does not mean that each student understands the whole course. From this point of view, what the professor did is just wrong as it does not show what it was intended to do.

Concerning posting the past exams on a website, it was something that was normal at my university and even provided by professors. One professor even reused the same questions every year and still failed most students because they just recited the answers and could not go deeper in the subject. For students, the past exams were really useful to figure out what material we understood and what we needed more work on. So I think it is wrong to prevent the use of past exams to practice. Which leads me to my next problem with this experiment: students with no intention to cheat but got confused from the answers they found. Of course, it stems from their misunderstanding of the course, but it adds to their confusion.

As a past teacher, I think this experiment is wrong not because of the ethics of it, but because it fails to achieve its goal, and might confuse even more students. The goal of a teacher should not be to fail their students, but to improve their class to help them understand the course. Some students will always cheat, but if the solution to that may push others to fail by confusing them, it is just not worth it.

Willie Abrams
9 months ago

“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.”

That is a great mischaracterization of Quizlet that attempts to try and justify everything the professor did after that. Students are looking for better ways to study. Lots of students use Quizlet flashcards. Lots of classes use Quizlets. The professor mainly proved that Quizlet provided a more effective way of studying for his final than his class did if he hadn’t posted incorrect answers.

Yes, I’m assuming a lot about the format of what he uploaded…Did they know it was his exact test?

Edmund Chattoe-Brown
Edmund Chattoe-Brown
Reply to  Willie Abrams
9 months ago

But this suggests that the sole measure of “effective study” is the exam mark (so stealing the answers is the most effective of all). There is also a “due process” element. The test is designed to measure what you _learned_ and copying from Quizlet is not learning. (And it doesn’t matter whether you characterise Quizlet as a “cheating site” or not.) There is no evidence at all that the instructor’s course was not effective (so students were “obliged” to seek an alternative) and, in fact, he makes the point that students who had attended (in both senses) would have known that the faked answers were not just wrong but ridiculous … I don’t think the ethics of this are a no brainer either way but the data is sufficiently important that education can’t really afford to get distracted from it.

Ryan Haggels
8 months ago

What this hypothetical philosophy teacher did and what you did are not comparable seeing as the students were already looking for a means to cheat. That is proven by them being on a website that was designed specifically for cheating and using it to deliberately seek out information that they are not supposed to access. What you did was trick someone who was not looking for something into finding something on a site that isn’t designed for that purpose. One is unethical, the other is not.

Justin Fisher
8 months ago

I’m very late to this party, but here are my two cents.

I definitely wouldn’t have set a trap like this myself, since this trap easily could be tripped by a quite innocent student who wanted to study the material in advance, searched on quizlet, saw that someone had already made publicly available study materials for the class, and took time to study that as part of their exam preparation. Perhaps this approach to studying violates some subtle rules, but in general I wouldn’t want to throw the book at a student who prepared for an exam in that way, and I would feel very bad about having set up misleading answers for them to memorize, as this would likely sow confusion and self-doubt into their sincere attempt to learn course material.

If (apparently contrary to fact) this exam had been scheduled to occur at a particular time, and the instructions were that students were to take the exam without accessing other materials, and the “trap” answers were available online *only* at this time when no students were allowed to be accessing such materials, then my concern would mostly evaporate, since it would be very unlikely for an innocent student to stumble into such a trap. But Garret reports in this thread that his trap was up for a much longer period, and that visits spiked “during finals week”, with no indication that the students who got drawn in by the trap were drawn in *while*taking*the*exam* (which I would view as cheating if it was explicitly forbidden by rules), rather than being drawn in *while*studying*beforehand* which I would view as quite innocent.

So it looks to me that his setting this trap was probably unethical, not (just, or perhaps even at all) because it was “entrapment” or “facilitating cheating”, but instead because this trap can’t discriminate between truly guilty students and students that are quite innocent, and because whenever it does ensnare innocent students, it harms them in multiple ways that I don’t think are justifiable.

BrooklynKN
BrooklynKN
6 months ago

I totally agree with this professor! They weren’t supposed to be cheating PERIOD! you all need to look up the definition of “entrapment”. I do the exact same thing but I don’t report them for cheating, I just give them the F they rightfully EARNED! You all that are out here defending cheating have no clue what’s on the line! These cheaters get into med school and are ignorant AF! Then when they end up kiIIing your loved one or permanently injuring you, you wanna sue them for millions of dollars. Yet you pushed against us when we tried to hold them accountable so they wouldn’t be able to get to you. Heaven forbid we try to save lives by pointing out those who lack the morals, integrity and knowledge to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacists and educators.

John L Hallowitz
John L Hallowitz
2 months ago

I do not think that taking countermeasures against cheaters, as this professor did, is unethical. What would be unethical is to acquiesce to this by throwing up our hands and doing nothing about it. Cheating hurts the honest student, the instructor, and the institution. It lessens the validity of passing marks and the degrees that are awarded by the institution. The price of academic integrity is eternal vigilance at all levels of the institution.

Ultimately, this particular ploy is ineffective against cheaters who used a different website. I suspect the students who were caught were only the “low hanging fruit.” If the professor had only scrubbed Quizlet, all the students who were caught with wrong answers would have just used another cheating resource that had answers for his test. Cheating sites do plagiarize each other, so the old test, with correct answers, is indubitably still out there along with the false answer version. Afterall, there are many such websites other than Quizlet.

[Googling individual questions or suspect responses, is one way to find other such websites.]

A move to more effectively encourage study, would be to post, not the false answer test, but the study material he already shares with his class. Thus, encouraging study.

IMHO: On high stakes assignments, there is nothing like having students do extended responses in a “little blue book” in controlled environment such as the in person timed exam. Online courses do provide a greater degree of difficulty to manage, but there are companies that sell software that does catch a lot of plagiarism in essays.

All institutions of learning should be teaching their staff about known methods of cheating and of proven countermeasures, including providing software to help the staff stymie, dissuade, and catch transgressors.