From mcarrier at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 09:14:01 2021 From: mcarrier at uoregon.edu (Mark Carrier) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:14:01 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miche at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 09:40:43 2021 From: miche at uoregon.edu (Anne 'Michelle' Wood) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:40:43 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: HI Kelly, So far I have been either lucky or incredibly naieve because I've not experienced widespread cheating in any classes. Usually the sort of 'technically correct but not-from-the class" wrong answer you describe varies from student-to-student or clearly comes from the top Google hit when you search the obvious keyword. This latter leads to something that looks like collaboration because severl people use the same phrases, but it is really a serch engine deriviative. I now have a syllabus policy that I even sometimes repeat in the instructions for assignments and, especially exams, that says the exams are to provide them an opportunity to show what they have learned in class and to demonstrate an ability to apply the material from class. "While being able to look things up on the WWW is a useful skill, factually correct answers not based on course material will not earn as much credit as exemplary mastery and engagement with course material" If I were dealing with the situation you describe, I would probably throw out the questions involved with the explanation to students that there were so many duplicative answers derived from outside the class that the question (and/or content) was not a good measure of mastery of course material. This might hurt some students who got it right, but - generally - those students would probably also do well on the questions you retain. This would only work if you have enough questions left to have a reasonable exam. You could also reiterate that using outside resources is not allowed and that by using these resource students who did so potentially harmed the students who made the best of the 'difficult' question. Thanks for bringing this up. I think it is good for us to continue to report our experiences and solutions to cheating. I think we have to do everything we can to elevate honest behavior and create consequences for opportunists and cheaters. Best regards, Michelle ________________________________ From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu on behalf of Kelly Sutherland Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2021 4:31 PM To: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From harms at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 09:42:49 2021 From: harms at uoregon.edu (Mike Harms) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:42:49 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> Message-ID: <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miche at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 09:47:31 2021 From: miche at uoregon.edu (Anne 'Michelle' Wood) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:47:31 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu>, <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> Message-ID: HI MIke, I use that approach on a lot of things, and almost entirely in my 400/500 classes. I'm not a big fan of using grades to create 'rankings' anyway and, if everyone can get it and do good work, all "A"s is fine with me. For the purposes of grad schools and medical schools, I think there would still be enough difference among gpa's of applicants with this approach to give them the information about students that they actually need. Michelle ________________________________ From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu on behalf of Mike Harms Sent: Friday, March 19, 2021 9:42 AM Cc: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From harms at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 09:50:37 2021 From: harms at uoregon.edu (Mike Harms) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:50:37 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> Message-ID: <7B6792E9-7828-489D-9AD3-003F515FA1BE@uoregon.edu> Hi Michelle, Ditto on the upper-division grading approach. Basically, I tried to translate that down to lower division courses. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:47, Anne 'Michelle' Wood > wrote: HI MIke, I use that approach on a lot of things, and almost entirely in my 400/500 classes. I'm not a big fan of using grades to create 'rankings' anyway and, if everyone can get it and do good work, all "A"s is fine with me. For the purposes of grad schools and medical schools, I think there would still be enough difference among gpa's of applicants with this approach to give them the information about students that they actually need. Michelle ________________________________ From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu

> on behalf of Mike Harms > Sent: Friday, March 19, 2021 9:42 AM Cc: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu > Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bowerman at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 12:06:59 2021 From: bowerman at uoregon.edu (Bruce Bowerman) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2021 19:06:59 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> Message-ID: Just to chime in here, Tory Herman also took a similar approach to Mike with her BI282H course; 90% of the grade was pre- and post-lecture quizzes and homework, where students could work together, and the final exam (10%) of the grade was also a do at home and work together thing. Tory had not done this before; this was her first time. She feels like it was an effective way to address issues of students dropping Biology as a major (or Biochemistry), and that students benefitted very much from a homework intense and less exam-focused approach (no midterm; only one work together final exam). So far, it seems the grades are reasonably well spread out. I probably shouldn?t speak for Tory on this, but I think this is an accurate summary and maybe she is on the email list and can comment more if she likes! I am not recommending anything; just passing on information. Bruce On Mar 19, 2021, at 9:42 AM, Mike Harms > wrote: Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ksuth at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 21:20:16 2021 From: ksuth at uoregon.edu (Kelly Sutherland) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2021 04:20:16 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> Message-ID: Hello all, Many thanks for all of the helpful and supportive responses. It?s a good reminder of what a supportive teaching community we have. If our only concern was to stop cheating, it would be relatively simple. I think the big challenge is balancing learning, assessment, equity and academic integrity and all of this in an online learning environment. I put together a digest of all the responses below?lightly edited?since some of them only came to me. I hope it?s helpful for others. Some more details on my exam?I made it open book (but not open internet), had students sign a honor code waiver at the beginning and constrained the time. The course structure balances two exams with a lot of other kinds of assignments?lab reports, group projects, low stakes quizzes and in-class activities. The cheaters very obviously took material from the internet. Some of the answers were puzzling or outside the scope of the class and when I googled the exam question the same answers that appeared on student exams popped up first. This happened on at least one question for about 15 of the students in a 66 person class. I decided to follow Alan Kelly?s strategy and followed up with the 3 worst offenders. The same 3 students had been warned about plagiarism on their lab reports earlier in the class. I talked with each of them today one-on-one and they all confessed, apologized and agreed to a score of zero on the final. It is never pleasant to handle cases of academic misconduct but I really appreciated that they admitted their mistake and accepted the consequences. I told them that I appreciated their honesty and that how you handle a mistake can matter just as much as the mistake itself. Other times when I have confronted students, it hasn?t gone as smoothly. The students will all end up with Ds in the class and at least one of them is concerned about losing financial aid. Doesn?t feel good but it would have felt worse to let it go. Thanks again for the insights, Kelly -- @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike ________________________________ So far I have been either lucky or incredibly naive because I've not experienced widespread cheating in any classes. Usually the sort of 'technically correct but not-from-the class" wrong answer you describe varies from student-to-student or clearly comes from the top Google hit when you search the obvious keyword. This latter leads to something that looks like collaboration because severl people use the same phrases, but it is really a serch engine deriviative. I now have a syllabus policy that I even sometimes repeat in the instructions for assignments and, especially exams, that says the exams are to provide them an opportunity to show what they have learned in class and to demonstrate an ability to apply the material from class. "While being able to look things up on the WWW is a useful skill, factually correct answers not based on course material will not earn as much credit as exemplary mastery and engagement with course material" If I were dealing with the situation you describe, I would probably throw out the questions involved with the explanation to students that there were so many duplicative answers derived from outside the class that the question (and/or content) was not a good measure of mastery of course material. This might hurt some students who got it right, but - generally - those students would probably also do well on the questions you retain. This would only work if you have enough questions left to have a reasonable exam. You could also reiterate that using outside resources is not allowed and that by using these resource students who did so potentially harmed the students who made the best of the 'difficult' question. Thanks for bringing this up. I think it is good for us to continue to report our experiences and solutions to cheating. I think we have to do everything we can to elevate honest behavior and create consequences for opportunists and cheaters. Best regards, Michelle ________________________________ I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark ________________________________ You might pursue only the most egregious cases that are easy to support. If you are successful, this could help get the word out that cheating doesn't pay if one gets caught (go for a severe "sanction," such as an F in the course). A colleague at another institution offered some degree of clemency if cheaters came forth and confessed (she had concrete proof; I will be happy to share how she trapped them if anyone is interested), so that might make a small dent if you can pull it off. If this is cheating via Chegg don't expect much useful information even if you file a formal complaint with them--I had up to 6 "suspects" but never received positive identification of the perpetrators from Chegg. I'm very sorry and disheartened to hear of this. One would think that at the upper level this would be less of an issue. But, I had one instance of blatant plagiarism in my 400-level class, so nothing is sacred. Alan ________________________________ Sorry to hear this. It's so disheartening and there's no easy answer. In 211 we definitely found exam questions posted to Chegg. This quarter I was able to tie most of that to a student who I spoke with today and without her wholly admitting to doing it we've scheduled an oral exam Monday of Spring Week 1. Not practical for a large group and I know there are students who I simply didn't catch which doesn't feel good. Do you know if it's Chegg/CourseHero etc? Or is it students with a shared google doc or discord site? Mark Carrier's had to deal with students using a discord site in 212 (that I'm sure started in 211, but his teaching team managed to infiltrate). Honestly I have more experience with what doesn't work than what works but I'm happy to talk it through with you sometime Nicola ________________________________ I feel so badly for you as it is so disappointing when this happens. What I have done in comparing answers and seeing very similar answers among a few students is give them a zero which then prompts them to contact me so that I can discuss with them directly. On Active Learning Questions, Lab write-ups and worksheets, routinely, we give them a warning about plagiarizing and about pulling things from Wikipedia or wherever, emphasize using course materials 1st, but I'm sure you have done all of this. After the the 2nd offense we don't give them any credit, that is issue 0s. One of the reasons I went to completely open book on my exams in Canvas is because of this problem of cheating. I've worked really hard in fact the hardest thing I have ever done in teaching for several decades in making out the Canvas exams so that they have barely enough time to complete and it's nearly impossible to cheat. I do have several people in different time zones, and had many in China during the summer, so I had to have a wide open window from 12 noon until 12 midnight for taking the exam, but I monitored things closely during the exams, track the order and timing of exams every hour or so, though or I did not officially proctor. Finally, when I have the remote gut feeling that someone is cheated I will send them a note in Canvas or by email because it acts as a check against the glass like in ice hockey! I don't know if any of this has helped but that's the best I can do right now. Best of luck in grading! Sincerely, pat l ________________________________ I?m sorry to hear that. It is disheartening, but unfortunately something a lot of us have experienced. Without knowing the ?rules? for you exam, it?s hard to give suggestions. If multiple students have the same wording and they were instructed to use their own words, then you could pursue that. Not only is that cheating, it?s plagiarism and I think the Dean of Students office would back that up. Many of us have found sharing of exam information on sites like Discord and Chegg, and looking at those sites might give you some idea of how the cheating occurred. If the wording on exams is matching posting on a site, it might be obvious that those students have cheated. Peter ________________________________ I have taught a small modeling class last Spring, so this approach may not work for everyone. I have switched to individual oral examinations, both for the midterm and the final exams. Each oral exam lasted for about 40 minutes, with me asking questions and the student answering them. I had a whiteboard on my end, and the students were also encouraged to have a whiteboard or notebook with them to sketch their responses. I had a GE silently observing the examinations and taking notes. Best regards. Stilian From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu On Behalf Of Bruce Bowerman Sent: Friday, March 19, 2021 12:07 PM To: Mike Harms Cc: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Just to chime in here, Tory Herman also took a similar approach to Mike with her BI282H course; 90% of the grade was pre- and post-lecture quizzes and homework, where students could work together, and the final exam (10%) of the grade was also a do at home and work together thing. Tory had not done this before; this was her first time. She feels like it was an effective way to address issues of students dropping Biology as a major (or Biochemistry), and that students benefitted very much from a homework intense and less exam-focused approach (no midterm; only one work together final exam). So far, it seems the grades are reasonably well spread out. I probably shouldn?t speak for Tory on this, but I think this is an accurate summary and maybe she is on the email list and can comment more if she likes! I am not recommending anything; just passing on information. Bruce On Mar 19, 2021, at 9:42 AM, Mike Harms > wrote: Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From miche at uoregon.edu Fri Mar 19 21:46:07 2021 From: miche at uoregon.edu (Anne 'Michelle' Wood) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2021 04:46:07 +0000 Subject: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam In-Reply-To: References: <220D2C91-AFBD-4F00-AB52-B68E5AD8EB20@uoregon.edu> <02047EF0-EACE-4466-8670-6E9984C2495A@uoregon.edu> , Message-ID: HI Kelly, Sounds good. Thanks for letting us know how it turned out, and for being so proactive. I may have understood there to be more variety in the answers and also, that the questions involved were a smaller % of the text when I made my recommendation. Mine recommendation was aimed at getting the message to all of the offenders it might shake them up a bit, and reach all of them, but - for better or worse- it does sort of let people off the hook. Michelle PS _ I think you probably know this, but when you do confront them and sanction them, you have to write this up for the student, and also report to the Director of Student Conduct and Community Standards" per the official student conduct code? See SEction VII.1.b. of the code, for acknowledged offenses. https://policies.uoregon.edu/vol-3-administration-student-affairs/ch-1-conduct/student-conduct-code Student Conduct Code | University of Oregon Policy Library The Student Conduct Code establishes community standards and procedures necessary to maintain and protect an environment conducive to learning and in keeping with the educational objectives of the University of Oregon. policies.uoregon.edu See also: https://dos.uoregon.edu/files/faculty-guide.pdf Addressing Academic Misconduct: Faculty Guide Addressing Academic Misconduct: Faculty Guide University of Oregon ? Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards Phone: 541-346-1140 Email: conduct at uoregon.edu Website: https://conduct.uoregon.edu Office: Oregon Hall 185 dos.uoregon.edu ________________________________ From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu on behalf of Kelly Sutherland Sent: Friday, March 19, 2021 9:20 PM To: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu ; Bruce Bowerman Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Hello all, Many thanks for all of the helpful and supportive responses. It?s a good reminder of what a supportive teaching community we have. If our only concern was to stop cheating, it would be relatively simple. I think the big challenge is balancing learning, assessment, equity and academic integrity and all of this in an online learning environment. I put together a digest of all the responses below?lightly edited?since some of them only came to me. I hope it?s helpful for others. Some more details on my exam?I made it open book (but not open internet), had students sign a honor code waiver at the beginning and constrained the time. The course structure balances two exams with a lot of other kinds of assignments?lab reports, group projects, low stakes quizzes and in-class activities. The cheaters very obviously took material from the internet. Some of the answers were puzzling or outside the scope of the class and when I googled the exam question the same answers that appeared on student exams popped up first. This happened on at least one question for about 15 of the students in a 66 person class. I decided to follow Alan Kelly?s strategy and followed up with the 3 worst offenders. The same 3 students had been warned about plagiarism on their lab reports earlier in the class. I talked with each of them today one-on-one and they all confessed, apologized and agreed to a score of zero on the final. It is never pleasant to handle cases of academic misconduct but I really appreciated that they admitted their mistake and accepted the consequences. I told them that I appreciated their honesty and that how you handle a mistake can matter just as much as the mistake itself. Other times when I have confronted students, it hasn?t gone as smoothly. The students will all end up with Ds in the class and at least one of them is concerned about losing financial aid. Doesn?t feel good but it would have felt worse to let it go. Thanks again for the insights, Kelly -- @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike ________________________________ So far I have been either lucky or incredibly naive because I've not experienced widespread cheating in any classes. Usually the sort of 'technically correct but not-from-the class" wrong answer you describe varies from student-to-student or clearly comes from the top Google hit when you search the obvious keyword. This latter leads to something that looks like collaboration because severl people use the same phrases, but it is really a serch engine deriviative. I now have a syllabus policy that I even sometimes repeat in the instructions for assignments and, especially exams, that says the exams are to provide them an opportunity to show what they have learned in class and to demonstrate an ability to apply the material from class. "While being able to look things up on the WWW is a useful skill, factually correct answers not based on course material will not earn as much credit as exemplary mastery and engagement with course material" If I were dealing with the situation you describe, I would probably throw out the questions involved with the explanation to students that there were so many duplicative answers derived from outside the class that the question (and/or content) was not a good measure of mastery of course material. This might hurt some students who got it right, but - generally - those students would probably also do well on the questions you retain. This would only work if you have enough questions left to have a reasonable exam. You could also reiterate that using outside resources is not allowed and that by using these resource students who did so potentially harmed the students who made the best of the 'difficult' question. Thanks for bringing this up. I think it is good for us to continue to report our experiences and solutions to cheating. I think we have to do everything we can to elevate honest behavior and create consequences for opportunists and cheaters. Best regards, Michelle ________________________________ I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark ________________________________ You might pursue only the most egregious cases that are easy to support. If you are successful, this could help get the word out that cheating doesn't pay if one gets caught (go for a severe "sanction," such as an F in the course). A colleague at another institution offered some degree of clemency if cheaters came forth and confessed (she had concrete proof; I will be happy to share how she trapped them if anyone is interested), so that might make a small dent if you can pull it off. If this is cheating via Chegg don't expect much useful information even if you file a formal complaint with them--I had up to 6 "suspects" but never received positive identification of the perpetrators from Chegg. I'm very sorry and disheartened to hear of this. One would think that at the upper level this would be less of an issue. But, I had one instance of blatant plagiarism in my 400-level class, so nothing is sacred. Alan ________________________________ Sorry to hear this. It's so disheartening and there's no easy answer. In 211 we definitely found exam questions posted to Chegg. This quarter I was able to tie most of that to a student who I spoke with today and without her wholly admitting to doing it we've scheduled an oral exam Monday of Spring Week 1. Not practical for a large group and I know there are students who I simply didn't catch which doesn't feel good. Do you know if it's Chegg/CourseHero etc? Or is it students with a shared google doc or discord site? Mark Carrier's had to deal with students using a discord site in 212 (that I'm sure started in 211, but his teaching team managed to infiltrate). Honestly I have more experience with what doesn't work than what works but I'm happy to talk it through with you sometime Nicola ________________________________ I feel so badly for you as it is so disappointing when this happens. What I have done in comparing answers and seeing very similar answers among a few students is give them a zero which then prompts them to contact me so that I can discuss with them directly. On Active Learning Questions, Lab write-ups and worksheets, routinely, we give them a warning about plagiarizing and about pulling things from Wikipedia or wherever, emphasize using course materials 1st, but I'm sure you have done all of this. After the the 2nd offense we don't give them any credit, that is issue 0s. One of the reasons I went to completely open book on my exams in Canvas is because of this problem of cheating. I've worked really hard in fact the hardest thing I have ever done in teaching for several decades in making out the Canvas exams so that they have barely enough time to complete and it's nearly impossible to cheat. I do have several people in different time zones, and had many in China during the summer, so I had to have a wide open window from 12 noon until 12 midnight for taking the exam, but I monitored things closely during the exams, track the order and timing of exams every hour or so, though or I did not officially proctor. Finally, when I have the remote gut feeling that someone is cheated I will send them a note in Canvas or by email because it acts as a check against the glass like in ice hockey! I don't know if any of this has helped but that's the best I can do right now. Best of luck in grading! Sincerely, pat l ________________________________ I?m sorry to hear that. It is disheartening, but unfortunately something a lot of us have experienced. Without knowing the ?rules? for you exam, it?s hard to give suggestions. If multiple students have the same wording and they were instructed to use their own words, then you could pursue that. Not only is that cheating, it?s plagiarism and I think the Dean of Students office would back that up. Many of us have found sharing of exam information on sites like Discord and Chegg, and looking at those sites might give you some idea of how the cheating occurred. If the wording on exams is matching posting on a site, it might be obvious that those students have cheated. Peter ________________________________ I have taught a small modeling class last Spring, so this approach may not work for everyone. I have switched to individual oral examinations, both for the midterm and the final exams. Each oral exam lasted for about 40 minutes, with me asking questions and the student answering them. I had a whiteboard on my end, and the students were also encouraged to have a whiteboard or notebook with them to sketch their responses. I had a GE silently observing the examinations and taking notes. Best regards. Stilian From: bioteaching-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu On Behalf Of Bruce Bowerman Sent: Friday, March 19, 2021 12:07 PM To: Mike Harms Cc: bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu Subject: Re: [Bioteaching] advice for addressing widespread cheating on exam Just to chime in here, Tory Herman also took a similar approach to Mike with her BI282H course; 90% of the grade was pre- and post-lecture quizzes and homework, where students could work together, and the final exam (10%) of the grade was also a do at home and work together thing. Tory had not done this before; this was her first time. She feels like it was an effective way to address issues of students dropping Biology as a major (or Biochemistry), and that students benefitted very much from a homework intense and less exam-focused approach (no midterm; only one work together final exam). So far, it seems the grades are reasonably well spread out. I probably shouldn?t speak for Tory on this, but I think this is an accurate summary and maybe she is on the email list and can comment more if she likes! I am not recommending anything; just passing on information. Bruce On Mar 19, 2021, at 9:42 AM, Mike Harms > wrote: Hi All, @Kelly: This probably doesn?t help your current situation, but I thought I?d toss out how I thought about this when I taught two relatively large remote courses this Fall (BI281H and CH360). I took the radical step of saying up-front that everyone could work together and could use any resource on every assignment, including exams. In my view, anything technically feasible will be done. I can?t keep students from working together or accessing the Internet, just like legacy record companies could not prevent people from sharing music files back in the day. I felt that if I made working together against the rules, the students at the greatest disadvantage would be those that followed my rules. This disincentivizes rule-following and hurts the most honest students. I therefore gave out challenging, reasoning-style exams with only one rule: each person had to draw their own graphs and write their own text. So what happened when I did this? Everyone did really, really well. The exam quality was top-notch, across the board. I also observed very little evidence of copy-paste style cheating. There were clearly groups that worked together and had similar lines of reasoning, but students generally followed the ?own text? rule. In talking to some of the students, it basically turned the exams into high-stakes homework sets. The stronger students had to explain their reasoning to the weaker students, and the weaker students had to pose questions to the stronger students and rearticulate what they understood. My gut says the students learned more in this way than they would have with a conventional exam. The downside, of course, is that I don?t really know what the students learned because I my exams had no power as assessment instruments. Many students received As that would have certainly not gotten As under a conventional exam/grading scheme. If the goal of grading is to sort students into categories of success, my scheme failed miserably. It is also probably not sustainable long term. But as a stop-gap measure in this extraordinary situation, I think it worked pretty well. Mike --- Michael J. Harms Ph.D. Associate Professor Chemistry & Biochemistry Institute of Molecular Biology University of Oregon harmslab.uoregon.edu 541-346-9002 (work) 541-968-0035 (cell) On Mar 19, 2021, at 09:14, Mark Carrier > wrote: Hi Kelly, I'm so sorry to hear this, and not in the least surprised. We used a combination of proctoring, the fabricated story that we were making use of a new Canvas academic integrity tool set (fooled my TAs even), lots of Canvas formula questions, lots of similar looking but different questions between versions of the tests, puzzles using data from recent papers but with the gene or protein names changed, and a relatively time-constrained open-notes exam format. I'm pretty sure we thwarted most cheaters from cheating productively on exams. But on all the other assignments (like homework sets and lectures embedded within quizzes) they cheated with gusto. We had access to a social media site a large number of students were using, using Discord software, and even though I was very specific about what sort of group work was encouraged and what constitutes cheating, they cheated. They shared confirmed answers, for instance. My putting the homework problems on an exam and pointing out that by cheating they had shot themselves in the foot only pissed them off. By "them" I mean a small loud set who behaved disgracefully all term. It was as depressing to witness as national politics, with conspiracy theories and vaguely threatening posts directed at those who might consider "narc-ing" about what was being posted. Social media really brings out the worst in people. To counter this we are setting up the Discord site ourselves next term. Students can go form a different site of course, but by creating the default place to go chat about the class we hope to keep those less motivated to cheat and bully from participating in the worst behavior. I just keep reminding myself that most of them don't cheat. In a class of 360 the number of bad actors feels large, but is still a relatively small fraction of people in the class. At least on assignments on which cheating is inconvenient. Mark On Mar 18, 2021, at 4:31 PM, Kelly Sutherland > wrote: Hi all, I am grading the Canvas online final exam for BI357 (Marine Biology) and there?s evidence of widespread cheating. I don?t think it?s realistic to pursue each student that I suspect of cheating and it can also be hard to prove. For example, some students had answers that were technically correct but included information that we never discussed in class. I am not shocked but definitely disappointed and am wondering what other folks have done to address instances of widespread academic misconduct, especially this year. Would people be willing to share their experiences/approaches? Many thanks, Kelly ________ Kelly R Sutherland, PhD (she, her) Associate Professor of Biology Oregon Institute of Marine Biology University of Oregon Office: 473B Onyx Bridge Phone: 541-346-8783 sutherlandlab.org @SutherlandLab _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching _______________________________________________ Bioteaching mailing list Bioteaching at lists.uoregon.edu https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/bioteaching -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: