[Bioteaching] Fwd: GroupMe cheating schemes

[Bruce Bowerman]

Dear Biology Faculty,

Just want to share this feedback from Laurel and Peter about the cheating business and their experience and response in their course (BI213, the one the parents wrote about). It provides a nice summary of measures one can take to address this problem (I believe the measures were already included in other email you’ve received, but wanted to share this one as a good example).

Bruce

Begin forwarded message:

From: Laurel Pfeifer Meister <lpfeife1 at uoregon.edu<mailto:lpfeife1 at uoregon.edu>>
Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] GroupMe cheating schemes
Date: May 4, 2020 at 8:04:32 AM PDT
To: Bruce Bowerman <bowerman at uoregon.edu<mailto:bowerman at uoregon.edu>>
Cc: Peter Wetherwax <pwax at uoregon.edu<mailto:pwax at uoregon.edu>>

Hi Bruce,

Given you were the one that received the email and that it specifically referenced 213, I thought I'd give you a little more info. on how Peter and I have been trying to discourage this in case you feel a response to this parent is warranted.

(1) We were made aware of one groupme site at the beginning of the term and we had 1 GE and 1 undergrad assistant join the group to help monitor.  That group continues to be active and students have shared screenshots of assignments.  However, these screenshots are on assignments we encourage students to work together.  If they aren't learning the material themselves on these lower stake assignments, then they won't do very well on the Friday quizzes or midterm.  The mean thus far for our Friday quizzes has ranged from 70-73% (similar to in person classes), suggesting if there is widespread cheating they aren't doing a very good job at it.

(2) There was one incident where a student shared part of Friday quiz question quite innocently without giving away any answers. For the Friday quiz, we have students sign an honesty pledge saying that they will adhere to the UO academic integrity code.  We also explicitly say that asking or giving help on these quizzes is a violation.  We spoke directly with the student that shared the image making it clear that if she had questions she should only email Peter and I (again this was a fairly innocent situation that was trying to clear up a typo) and nothing has happened since then (to our knowledge).

(3) We use a bank of questions on the Friday quizzes and for the upcoming midterm, with answers being shuffled.  For math question, we are now generating 50 different questions with the formula function in Canvas.  We obviously can't do 50 questions for the other banks but are doing the best we can to generate multiple versions that ask the same concepts.  For the midterm and final exam, we are also using more short answer questions which should make cheating more difficult.

(4) We have not curved any assignment as the parent suggested, (but perhaps they were referring to a different class).

(5) We encourage any student that sees inappropriate behavior to come forward (they can even share a link to the groupme site with us). Students could theoretically share screenshots anonymously through the courseconcern email.

That's about all I can think of, but just wanted to convey that we are doing the best we can in this difficult time to discourage cheating.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Laurel

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