Schools Call it Cheating - Industries Call it Collaboration
Throughout my career, I’ve had countless conversations with educators regarding how to prevent cheating on their assessments. With the vast number of exams that are getting rapidly converted to online delivery due to COVID-19, this conversation has reached a fever pitch. Many of the typical approaches to conducting a secure assessment such as live proctors, locking away paper-based exams, giving small windows of test availability, using passcodes, and others have proven more and more difficult to perpetuate. Under the new demands of teaching in a COVID world, they are especially problematic. Whether you are teaching online, hybrid, blended, virtual, hyflex, classroom, or a myriad of other modalities that have recently sprung up, the one almost certain thing is you are teaching differently than you used to. And with new instructional delivery, everyone is looking for new ways to ensure exam security.
Combine this with the knowledge that students can sometimes put more effort into figuring out new ways to cheat, then it would take to learn the material legitimately, and we have a significant crisis of integrity.
If you are one that thinks cheating isn’t much of a problem, just remember there are entire industries dedicated to helping solve this problem, all of which are scrambling right now to keep up with the demand for their services. Plagiarism detectors, virtual proctoring services, and lockdown browsers to name a few.
As I consider this challenge, it leads me to wonder. Why are we spending so much time and money worrying about cheating? Perhaps we haven’t made any real gains in this area because we treat the symptoms but not the real problem. Perhaps there is a way to eliminate cheating by taking a wholly different approach to the situation. Perhaps a little bit of design thinking can go a long way to remove both the ability and temptation for students to cheat.
“Redesigning the assessments with a bent toward purposeful collaboration can eliminate cheating while simultaneously developing a real-world high demand skill.”
Before I go any further down that line of thinking, I want to address the other side of this conversation. The way we define cheating in school. Every job I’ve ever had required at least a small amount of collaboration to get the work done, and in many cases, If I had tried to work alone, I would have indeed failed. The work I do today demands more of me than I could ever accomplish on my own, and I am grateful to good colleges, leaders, and teammates that I collaborate with daily. I’m thankful because the work we do depends on the skills, passions, and wisdom of the entire group. None of us have enough to get the job done on our own. During this collaboration, I am continually asking questions, admitting mistakes, getting feedback, and iterating my work. Through all this collaboration, I’ve never heard any of my bosses say, “Hey, you can’t do that! That’s cheating! If you’re always working with others, how can I be sure you know how to do the job on your own?”
However, I have heard lots of statements like this.
“Let me know if you have questions.”
“Johnny here is going to be your mentor.”
“You won’t get it right the first time, but I’m sure you’ll pick it up quickly enough.”
“Everyone here is happy to answer any questions, so don’t be shy.”
You get the point. Collaboration has become a pillar of the modern workforce that most of us cannot succeed without it. Even professionals like medical doctors rely on an entire team of staff to accomplish the vital work they do.
So if today’s workforce requires us to be proficient in skillful collaboration, why do we so often create assessments designed to disregard this demand and even punish students for trying?
Redesigning the assessments with a bent toward purposeful collaboration can eliminate cheating while simultaneously developing a real-world high demand skill.
Let’s break this idea down a little.
When an assessment is nothing more than a list of multiple-choice questions, we have committed two wrongs. We have both shortchanged the student’s opportunity to provide authentic evidence of their learning while simultaneously inviting them to find a way to cheat the system.
When the assessment is no more than a regurgitation of memorized facts, figures, and formulas, again, we are practically begging them to simply cram for the test resulting in little retention while providing them ample opportunity to find ways to cheat.
As a result, instead of addressing the poor design of the assessment, we add complicated strategies and layers of security to prevent what we are inadvertently reinforcing.
In addition to having a high propensity to cheat, these types of assessments also have no real-world relevance. For instance, I can’t recall ever being asked by my employer to fill out a multiple-choice test, complete an essay, or write a 5 paragraph paper to assess my ability to do my job. This doesn’t happen in the real world because everyone knows it doesn’t give them any practical information. The proof of my abilities is in the evidence of my accomplishments, and that is the primary method used in the real world to assess a person’s capabilities.
A primary reason we use these types of assessment has as much to do with their ease in grading as anything else. When they can be auto scored or graded by a machine, it’s tempting to work them in as often as possible, especially when you have hundreds of students in your classroom (see my last post for thoughts on this).
In contrast let’s review at least one assessment that if done right is practically cheat-proof by design.
Introducing Project-Based Learning.
This design approach could include an assessment such as video recordings taken by the student of themselves performing a particular skill, narrating their thinking as they go. The video is then submitted to the teacher for feedback. The teacher then allows the student to iterate on their work to show progress as the course progresses.
Or this approach could include a semester-long project where the students are encouraged to choose objectives and are given the autonomy to direct the project in a way that makes it personally relevant to their life and interests. Frequent checkpoints could be used to monitor the work and ensure they are progressing towards their own established goals.
Or this could include multidisciplinary coursework that incorporates several different subjects into a single culminating project that mirrors the way organizations coordinate their work, such as a business made up of sales, marketing, customer service, and products working together to hit corporate targets.
When courses are built with these types of assessments, research has proven that students are more likely to engage in the content. It’s also more meaningful to them personally, and they remember more from the experiences than from traditional didactic instruction followed by a traditional style exam.
For those of you who are saying to yourself, “This is all well and good, but it’s not very practical.” I say in response, “Show me one organization that can survive while embracing the idea that it’s ok to do something poorly just because it’s practical.” It may not be practical within the way the system is currently set up. Still, through innovation and the will to deliver a superior learning product, organizations all over the globe are already deeply committed to this approach to learning. They are the ones that will prove that when it comes to educating the future generations of this country, mediocrity is no longer ok, just because it’s practical.