Those who like to take it easy late in the week and don’t pay as much attention to news in the edusphere might have missed a journalistic bomb thrown by LearningMatters’ John Merrow as he reassessed Michelle Rhee’s tenure as the head of the Washington D.C. school system.

What spurred Merrow to give Rhee a second look were recent indictments handed down in Atlanta to Superintendent Beverly A. Hall and 34 other district employees for planning, aiding and abetting the largest cheating scandal in recent memory.

Rhee’s term as Schools Chancellor in Washington D.C. has long been marred by rumors that she was aware – and failed to investigate – instances of system-wide cheating on standardized exams in 2009. To allay concerns about the cheating, Rhee commissioned an outside company to compile a report. The results of the investigation were long kept hidden, but earlier this year an unnamed whistle-blower mailed two copies to Merrow after he wrote a column wondering how he could get his hands on it.

What that memo contained was explosive.

Prior to the memo becoming public knowledge, Merrow asked Rhee about the cheating for his PBS Frontline series on her:

Rhee has publicly maintained that, if bureaucratic red tape hadn’t gotten in the way, she would have investigated the erasures. For example, in an interview conducted for PBS’ “Frontline” before I learned about the confidential memo, Rhee told me, “We kept saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this; we just need to have more information.’ And by the time the information was trickling in back and forth, we were about to take the next year’s test. And there was a new superintendent of education that came in at the time. And she said, ‘Okay, well, we’re about to take the next test anyway so let’s just make sure that the proper protocols are in place for next time.’”

The conclusions of the so-called Stanford memo which both the author and Rhee wanted to keep confidential was unambiguous: judging by the number of wrong-to-right erasures on the test answer sheets, it suggested that cheating on standardized tests in District schools was prevalent and widespread,.

As a single example, a school that was rewarded by more than $270,000 for their 29% improvement in math and 43% in reading showed the ratio of wrong-to-right erasures of 5.7 on average and 6.8 in mathematics. Districtwide, the number was 1.7 and 2.3 respectively.

Sanford, a Marine officer who carved out a post-retirement career in data analysis in California, spelled out the consequences of a cheating scandal. Schools whose rising scores showed they were making “adequate yearly progress” as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act could “wind up being compromised,” he warned. And what would happen to the hefty bonuses Rhee had already awarded to the principals and teachers at high-achieving schools with equally high erasure rates, Sanford asked? And, Stanford pondered, “What legal options would we have with teachers found guilty of infractions? Could they be fired? Would the teachers’ contract allow it?”

It isn’t hard to deduce why Rhee would close her eyes to the cheating scandal that was staring right at her. Not only was she generously remunerated for her accomplishments as Chancellor, after leaving her post she now heads a hugely influential lobbying group StudentsFirst that seeks to apply the same methods to other districts she pioneered in Washington. For a lot of people who count, Michelle Rhee is the face of school reform successfully implemented.

Rhee wasn’t the causus belli of cheating in Washington, but her policies likely set the stage. When she first took over as Chancellor, Rhee applied pressure – in person — to her principals by asking them to commit to specific improvement numbers. Thus the motivation was created, but the means and opportunity existed well before Rhee came on the scene.

According to teachers who were employed before, during and after Rhee’s tenure, the test administration process in the district was abysmal. The test booklets arrived well in advance of test time and weren’t sealed. It was also an open secret that favored teachers were given opportunities by the principals to get a look at the questions prior to the exam.

After-the-fact cheating–by erasing and changing answers–was even easier. “The tests would stay in the building for almost two weeks after they were given” so students who had missed a test could make it up. “They were in the building for a good month between arriving about a week ahead of time and finally getting shipped out. It would have been fairly easy for people to sit down and look through the booklets and change answers.”

The most important question Merrow asks is located at the end of the article: now what? Should the district expand resources to investigate cheating scandals that took place in 2008, 2009, and 2010? Undoing the damage done to students is going to be nearly impossible, and clawing back bonuses awarded on a lie will be more impossible still.

While erasure analysis would reveal the extent of cheating, what deserves careful scrutiny is the behavior of the leadership when it learned that a significant number of adults were probably cheating, because five years later, Rhee’s former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.

The post Michelle Rhee’s No Good, Very Bad Weekend appeared first on Education News.

An earlier assertion that there had only been one round of faculty email searches to find the source of leaks about last year’s Harvard cheating scandal has been proven false, The Harvard Crimson reports. Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds informed other faculty members that she authorized a second round of searches that targeted only the one dean suspected most strongly of leaking information.

The first round targeted 16 resident deans associated with the College of Arts and Science, and both searches contradict the college’s faculty email privacy policy that requires the approvals of the dean and the University Office of the General Counsel before such a search can be undertaken. According to FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, he was not consulted prior to the search being initiated.

On March 11, Smith and Hammonds released a statement which said the searches were “limited to the Administrative accounts for the Resident Deans…as distinct from their individual Harvard email accounts.”

But on Tuesday, Hammonds doubled back on that as she read prepared remarks to a packed room of faculty in University Hall.

“Although I consulted with legal counsel, I did not inform Dean Smith about the two additional queries. This was a mistake. I also regret the inaccuracies in our March 11 communication resulting from my failure to recollect the additional searches at the time of that communication,” Hammonds said.

Hammonds wasn’t the only one addressing the meeting. A number of top administrators apologized to the school faculty, which was the first since the news broke in early March that the searches has been run. Although the main focus of the meeting was supposed to be revisions to the school’s honor code, discussion of the searches dominated the gathering, with administrators alternatively defending their actions and apologizing for them — and faculty members expressing anger and disappointment.

Speaking in turn at the start of the 90-minute meeting, University President Drew G. Faust, Smith, and Hammonds all acknowledged that the searches had been mishandled. Speaking in somber tones, Smith and Hammonds took full responsibility for the way the investigation was conducted.

The first set of searches only looked at staff accounts of resident deans which were not protected by the faculty email policy. Since resident deans are considered simultaneously college staff and faculty, access to the accounts didn’t run afoul of the privacy clause.

The searches were conducted to determine who had been the source of the media leak disclosing that Harvard was investigating allegations that a substantial number of students had cheated on the take-home final exam for a required Government course.

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According to the head of the leading exam board in England testifying before members of Parliament, the incentives put in place by the new testing system could encourage teachers to artificially inflate student scores. New measures put into place by the Coalition government link teacher performance to student test results, which means that teachers are under increased pressure to show improved scores — which they say is exactly the environment ripe for a cheating scandal.

AQA exam board’s chief executive Andrew Hall said he didn’t think that cheating was to blame for this summer’s GCSE English exam scandal, but said that the way incentives were set up made it difficult to assess their impartiality when assigning marks. This lack of impartiality and the fact that teachers had direct control over 60% of the final exam mark is what led the exam boards to toughen the grade boundaries of the exam to the outrage of the students who felt that they had been lowballed.

The parliamentary hearing followed a high court ruling last month against an alliance of pupils, unions, schools and councils who alleged that the government’s exam regulator, Ofqual, and the exam boards Edexcel and AQA had unfairly moved the boundary, in a last-minute “statistical fix” to counter exam grade inflation.

The bar was raised higher than for pupils who submitted papers in the earlier January marking round and some pupils claim they missed out on sixth-form places because of the change.

Statistical analysis of the exam results showed that teacher judgment played an outsized role in final grade assignments according to Hall’s testimony. He acceded to the suggestion made by the committee chairman Graham Stuart that when a mere two points made the difference between a lower and a higher final grade, the temptation to find them would be a very difficult one for a teacher to resist.

Ziggy Liaquat, the managing director of the exam board Edexcel, also said his exam board, which accounted for 10% of English GCSEsassessed last year, had observed inaccurate marking by teachers.

“We adjusted downwards 8% and we adjusted upwards 5% so there was inaccurate marking both ways,” he said. He added the evidence did not yet show teachers had pushed marks deliberately to cross grade boundaries.

Mark Dawe, who headed the exam board OCR, was the only one testifying who said that his board didn’t find evidence of overmarking in the exam papers it reviewed.

Graham isn’t the first to observe that the culture of high-stakes testing is a breeding ground for cheating. In the fall of last year, Kim Dancy of The Georgetown Public Policy Review looked at the issue in detail, concluding that when jobs and promotions hinge on test results, artificial grade inflation inevitably follows – the temptation being too much for administrators and teachers to overcome.

And so it proved. The first major standardized-test related cheating scandal concerned a round of testing in Atlanta public schools in 2009. Similar allegations about several other districts, from Los Angeles to Brooklyn rapidly surfaced. In some cases, it wasn’t even the cheating that made headlines, but the horrible pressure applied to those who refused to go along. As lurid as these stories are, they point to a pervasive problem that is growing and spreading in K-12 education.

The post High-Stakes UK Testing Could Lead to Cheating, Offical Says appeared first on Education News.

According to The Boston Globe, administrators at Harvard University searched the email accounts of 16 resident deans in the wake of the leak on the school’s cheating scandal last year. The searches were not disclosed and were done to determine who had originally given the information on the incident to the media.

The deans all sat on the university’s Administrative Board which was charged with investigating the cheating allegations. According to Globe’s sources, none of the people whose accounts were breached were informed of the action in advance and only one of the people affected was informed after.

The information about the widespread cheating in a university course came to light after one of the deans sent a confidential Administrative Board memo to a student advisee, who then passed it on the university’s newspaper The Harvard Crimson. A disciplinary action for the forward is not expected and the name of the dean was not released.

The other 15 deans were left unaware their email accounts had been searched by administrators until the Globe approached Harvard with questions about the incident on Thursday, having learned of it from multiple Harvard officials who described it in detail. Those officials asked for anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

Harvard administrators said they would inform the remaining deans today — almost six months after the search.

Only the email accounts used for administrative business were searched by administrators. Typically, Harvard staff members have two accounts – one used for school-related business and the other for more personal correspondence. The personal accounts were not searched.

There’s some dispute if the deans – who are not officially faculty members, but do have some teaching responsibilities – are protected by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science policy that guarantees email privacy, among other things.

“If reading the deans’ email is really OK by the book, why didn’t they just ask the deans who leaked the memo, threatening to read their email if no one came forward?” said Harry Lewis, a computer scientist and former dean of the college who helped draft its current email privacy policy for faculty. “Why not tell them what was being done if it was really an OK thing to do?”

In response to Globe’s requests for interviews, Michael Smith, the dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences, released a statement last week defending the search as necessary to protect the integrity of the Board’s administrative process.

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One of the things keeping massive online open courses from becoming a standard for college instruction is the fact that there’s no practical means at the moment to make sure that students do their own work instead of getting help from friends, classmates or Google. Before colleges and universities can move to granting course credit for MOOC work, there needs to be a way to make sure that students aren’t cheating.

One approach currently being explored by a number of schools utilizing the learning platform Coursera is to ask students to travel to a nearby testing center where they’re given an exam which is traditionally overseen and proctored. However, tying the courses to specific time and place might defeat the purpose of online courses since their selling point is time and location flexibility – very useful to those who are limited in their travel.

But now eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A. can remotely track every mouse click and keystroke of test-taking students. Squads of eagle-eyed humans at computers can monitor faraway students via webcams, screen sharing and high-speed Internet connections, checking out their photo IDs, signatures and even their typing styles to be sure the test-taker is the student who registered for the class.

According to The New York Times, this kind of digital eavesdropping could prove to be more effective and minimizing cheating and catching rule-breakers than live proctoring ever was. CS Professor at Vanderbilt University Douglas H. Fisher said that while installing what some might term spyware on a student’s machine might make privacy advocates nervous, it presents no more of a violation than sitting in front of a teacher overseeing your test.

The product in question is offered by ProctorU. It utilizes not just keyboard and mouse tracking software, but also uses screen sharing and a digital camera to keep an eye on the students. The system is set to get its first test very soon, as the company just signed an agreement with Coursera to proctor one of its credit-bearing courses. Each student will be charged a $60 fee for the service.

Other remote proctoring services offer different solutions. At Software Secure in Newton, Mass., test-takers are recorded by camera and then, later, three proctors independently watch a faster-speed video of each student. Compared with services where proctors are monitoring students in real time, this combination of recording first and viewing later “gives greater latitude for the institution to adjust the timing of exams to whenever they want,” said Allison Sands, Software Secure’s director of marketing. The cost is now $15 per exam.

The post Screensharing, Webcams Help Cut Down on MOOC Cheating appeared first on Education News.

Cheating appears to have taken an unusual form in Columbus schools. A study of computer logs undertaken by The Columbus Dispatch uncovered instances of district employees changing student letter grades some 5,300 times over the course of one year, all in an attempt to “scrub” the data in order to meet state and federal achievement metrics.

The most active in the grade-changing game was Stanley K. Pyle, the assistant principal at Marion-Franklin High School who used the system 495 times to swap grades, mostly from Fs to Ds. That accounts for 9% of all failing-to-passing grade changes for the entire 2010-11 academic year.

The Dispatch attempted to get a statement from district officials and directly from Pyle on its findings, but received no response over email or the phone. Jeff Warner, the district spokesman, said only that such activity by a school administrator wouldn’t be unusual, as one of Pyle’s responsibilities would have been to make sure that all grades were entered correctly.

 The lawyer the district hired to conduct an investigation that parallels that of the state auditor said there are likely good explanations why some employees changed huge numbers of grades. It was their job to correct data, he said. The failing-to-passing changes to final marks are just one type of change made to student grades. Such changes could have awarded students credits, which could have affected graduation rates. Auditors have asked whether the rates are accurate. School employees made more than 311,000 grade changes overall during the school year in question. The district, which is Ohio’s largest, has about 50,000 students.

In addition to the internal investigation by the district, the Dispatch’s findings also attracted the attention of State Auditor David Yost. They have been looking at the data since June in an attempt to determine if the grade changes were legitimate or an attempt by school officials to make their results look better than they were.

But grade changes weren’t the only kind of record altering going on. Officials also retroactively withdrew students who had missed a large portion of the school year or who received low results on the standardized tests.

Yost now is investigating Columbus separately. His audit of other Ohio districts’ scrubbing practices will be released late this month; Columbus’ won’t come out in the near future, he said.

“You pull the string and watch the ball unroll,” he said of his growing Columbus investigation. “ I can’t possibly predict when we’re going to be done there.”

Yost said last week that he can’t comment about the grade-changing data. The district’s internal auditor mentioned grade changing as a potential problem in the audit she released last month.

Although principals and assistant principals do indeed have the power to change grades in the system after they’ve been entered, the standard operating procedure for such changes requires that each instance is recorded so the process could later be audited.

The post Ohio Auditor Investigates Grade Changing in Columbus appeared first on Education News.

Results of the investigation by the U.S. Department of Education of the cheating scandal in Washington. D.C. schools are in, and according to the Inspector General, there is no evidence to confirm that cheating was widespread in the school system. The findings, which were released earlier this week, serve as a vindication for former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose tenure was shadowed by accusations that most of the gains made in the district were due to misconduct during the administration of standardized exams.

The investigation was launched in response to allegations by Adell Cothorne, who used to head up the school at the epicenter of the scandal – Noyes Education Campus – that the district applied for and won several federal grants only because district officials submitted results from exams where cheating was suspected. The findings confirm that cheating went on at one of the schools whose results were submitted in grant applications, but that the problem went no further.

As chancellor from 2007 to 2010, Rhee placed an emphasis on student test scores, tying exam results to the pay and employment status of teachers and principals. The approach produced higher scores, but also became the focus of public controversy in 2011 after a USA Today investigation documented an unusually high number of wrong-to-right pencil erasures on standardized test papers going back to 2008. The testing company, CTB-McGraw/Hill, however, pointed out the erasures to then state superintendent Deborah Gist in 2008.

Critics are already speaking up about the report for its lack of breadth. Although a high number of erasures were reported in nearly half of the district’s schools – with the highest number showing up during Rhee’s first year in the job – only results from a single school were looked at. The Inspector General’s office also didn’t look at the data from Rhee’s first year in office at all.

Cothorne, who headed up Noyes during the 2010-2011 academic year, alerted her superiors to the possibility that cheating might be going on after finding a number of teachers in a room surrounded by exam booklets and answer sheets.

In her lawsuit, Cothorne outlines several other incidents of alleged cheating she said she observed while principal at Noyes. Each involved the DC BAS test, a practice test leading up to the year-end DC CAS test.

In one instance, Cothorne reported walking in on a teacher teaching materials that were going to be on the DC BAS exam while test booklets were in front of the students. In a separate incident, a Noyes teacher allegedly told her, “You know they cheat on their tests,” according to the complaint. When test security was later tightened at Noyes, according to Cothorne, scores fell by 25 percent.

The post No Indications of Widespread Exam Cheating Found in DC appeared first on Education News.

The investigation of standardized test cheating in Pennsylvania is slowly winding down, the San Francisco Gate reports. For the past 17 months, education authorities have been looking into allegations of misconduct in the administration and grading of state reading and math tests, and now only the Philadelphia school district and two charters that operate in the city are still awaiting the release of the findings and notification of any possible sanctions.

Officials targeted test results obtained between the years of 2009 and 2011, and more than 48 districts and charters were under the microscope. Specifically, there was a question about an abnormally large number of wrong-to-right erasures on student exam papers, a situation similar to the one that triggered a mass cheating investigation in Atlanta, Georgia.

Although eventually 30 districts were cleared of any wrongdoing, evidence of tampering was uncovered in another 15.

“What we were seeing was not student work,” said Carolyn Dumaresq, the state’s deputy secretary for elementary and secondary education.

She stressed that in most cases, the misconduct was isolated to a single building or grade level within a district.

“There are a lot of professionals out there who were administering the test appropriately,” she said.

Although the problem might be considered isolated, still more than 140 professional misconduct complaints were filed against staff members at targeted schools. If allegations in the complaints are proven, offenders are faced with losing their teaching certifications.

Because pin-pointing the villain has proved tricky, especially in schools where access to test papers and answer sheets is not tightly controlled, districts themselves were ordered to conduct investigations, mete out punishments and tighten procedures governing the administration of state exams. Of the 15, 6 submitted altered plans that were accepted by the state education authorities.

Among the districts with acceptable plans, local officials meted out discipline: A principal in Berwick and a teacher in Big Beaver Falls were each given 10-day unpaid suspensions, and several reprimands and warnings were issued in Bethlehem and Scranton. Also in Scranton, a teacher was suspended without pay with intent to dismiss. School board vice president Nathan Barrett, who would not elaborate on details of the case, said at a recent board meeting that he supports the recommendation to fire the employee.

The investigation was kicked off thanks to the efforts of The Notebook, which uncovered and publicized the details of a 2009 forensic report which pointed to a high likelihood of cheating due to the number of wrong-to-right erasures. The Notebook is an independent news organization which includes the Philadelphia schools in its beat.

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By Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

When I read recently about how students at Stuyvesant High School and Harvard University, to name only two recent prominent examples, used everything from notes on scraps of paper to texting answers on cell phones to help each other out on exams, I had to shake my head—not at the students’ behavior, but at the institutional culture to which they were responding.

Nearly fifty years ago, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire published his influential book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he described “the banking system of education,” whereby students are treated as repositories for information that will be deposited into them by teachers.  Teachers are then able to “withdraw” the information from the students by means of tests.

Notice that it’s the teachers who are the active ones in this scenario; the students are simply passive recipients of knowledge.

In contrast, Freire proposed a dialogic form of education, where students’ ideas are valued by their teachers, and the pedagogical method is more of a conversation than a one-way lecture.

While still popular in some theoretical educational circles, it’s clear that Freire’s ideas are not in ascendancy in current American educational policy, which, in the No Child Left Behind era, has turned education into a process of leaping through the hoops of a long series of standardized tests.

Back in the 1970s, I went to a selective New York City public school, Hunter College High School.  When I took the entry test, in sixth grade, I had no test prep whatsoever.  My parents were very nonchalant about the whole thing, so I wasn’t nervous about it—it was just something I had to do, so I went in and did my best.  I got in, along with five others from my elementary school, P.S. 6.

What I remember from my four years at Hunter is earnest, thoughtful discussion classes in English and Social Studies and even Spanish, with teachers who treated us like budding intellectuals.  When I left Hunter after 10th grade to transfer to Simon’s Rock College, now known as Bard College at Simon’s Rock, the classroom conversations got even livelier and more compelling, and the written assignments more challenging.  We were asked to write analytic essays, persuasive essays and informed opinion pieces… over and over, at ever-higher standards of rigor.

The process culminated in the required year-long senior thesis project, which for me, as an English major, was an in-depth study of the trope of androgyny in the novels of Virginia Woolf.  There is no doubt in my mind that the joy I got out of reading everything Woolf wrote, and all the literary criticism about her work that I could find, led me to eventually choose to return to graduate school for a doctorate in Comparative Literature.

My point in relating this personal trajectory is to reflect that if I had only been asked, at each stage of my schooling, to memorize information and spit it back out to a teacher (or worse, a robo-grader) on standardized tests, I don’t know that I would have chosen to undertake the hard work of earning a doctorate and becoming a professor myself.

I would have had a very different idea of what education was all about.

And sadly, competitive test-taking does pass for education in too many scholastic and even academic environments these days.  Given this reality, who can fault students for trying to game a system that so clearly disrespects them as intellectuals and original thinkers?

I consider myself fortunate to be teaching now at my alma mater, an institution that values collaboration rather than competition, and thoughtfully constructed arguments over right-or-wrong multiple-choice tests.

Granted, I teach in the humanities, where memorization is less important than in the hard sciences. But even in the sciences, given the ready accessibility of our collective auxiliary internet brain trust, do we really need to be forcing students to memorize the periodical table anymore?

Isn’t it more important to give them assignments and challenges that will develop their teamwork skills and encourage them to think creatively, rather than spit back knowledge that has already been established?

Doing this requires us educators to create assignments that are more complex than simple multiple-choice tests.  That’s why it’s good news that the new federal Common Core standards that will be adopted over the next two years by K-12 school districts in 46 states will require the teaching of expository writing from elementary school on.

As a writing teacher, I know that while it’s possible to cheat on an essay assignment, it is much more difficult than on multiple-choice tests.  Requiring kids to write, rewrite, and write again is one of the best ways to ensure not only that they tread the straight and narrow path of ethical education, but also that they develop what may be the most important skill set of all: learning how to formulate original ideas, and express them in a polished, thoughtful way.

Here at Simon’s Rock, our orientation workshop for entering freshman is actually a writing boot camp, in which we have students reading, discussing, writing and workshopping writing for five hours a day during their first week at school.  We follow this up with three semesters of a required general education seminar, in which students are reading, discussing and writing almost constantly.

As a graduate of Simon’s Rock, the parent of a 2012 graduate, and a veteran of nearly 20 years as a Simon’s Rock professor of literature and general education, I know this approach works.

Sure, once in a while we have a student who tries to get away with plagiarizing a paper.  They are generally caught easily, because of all the draft stages we require students to go through on the way to turning in their final paper. Relatively few students try cheating, though, because they know we professors really want to know what they think about a given topic.  For us, learning is truly a dialogic process, and students quickly respond to the seriousness with which we take them as creative, original thinkers and writers.

Fundamentally, American educational policy needs to start treating students with the respect they deserve, whether they are at elite private schools or underperforming public schools.

It’s not the kid’s fault if he doesn’t know how to construct an expository argument in good English any more than it’s the kid’s fault if she decides to cheat on a test she knows doesn’t measure her accurately as a thinker.  It’s the school’s fault, and ultimately the nation’s fault.

Given the multiple crises today’s young people will be facing as they become adults on our overpopulated, environmentally damaged, violent planet, we need to be educating a generation of creative, collaborative problem-solvers for whom spoken and written eloquence is a necessary leadership tool.

This is not a matter of policy or even ethics.  It’s a matter of survival.

Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez, Ph.D. is an associate professor of comparative literature, media studies and human rights at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass.

The post A Closer Look at the Rise of the Cheating Culture appeared first on Education News.

One of the barriers to the wholesale adoption of online learning is the difficulty in detecting and punishing cheating. Without teachers supervising their students directly, student dishonesty – especially in the form of having another person complete the assigned work – becomes much more complicated.

That isn’t to say that the possibility of academic misconduct has put the brakes on the growth of online learning entirely. On the contrary, according to the data provided by the Babson Survey Research Group, last year the number of college students who took at least one online course grew by more than 10%.

But anyone who has ever taken such a course admits that the format lends itself to cheating much more easily than a course taught traditionally, which typically includes taking supervised and proctored exams.

In online education, it’s easy for students to “collaborate” on tests in ways that wouldn’t be possible in the classroom, says Shannon Miranda, a senior at Ohio University who has taken three online courses in her college career.

“If the teacher schedules an exam, you can have a bunch of people in one room sharing textbooks and taking the test at the same time,” Miranda says. “I know friends who have taken an online test first so the next person can have all the right answers.”

For Connie Frazer, the director of online learning at The Sage Colleges in Troy, New York, dealing with cheating in an online course is just a part of dealing with academic dishonesty in a college setting. Technology provides just another front on the fight against this problem, but doesn’t fundamentally change the game.

For Sage, that means the problem created by technology could be solved by a more judicious application of the same.

While students can take tests together, the online system may change up questions or answers to ensure students can’t cheat. Also, answers to the tests aren’t revealed until every student in the course has completed all the questions.

“In our learning management system, you shuffle the questions and you shuffle the items within the questions,” Frazer notes. “When a student looks at a quiz, it doesn’t look anything like the quiz another student is taking. It’s hard to borrow from someone else.”

What makes it easier is the fact that “collaboration” isn’t the main problem when it comes to online cheating. Instead, according to Diane Johnson, students in online courses tend to disproportionately run afoul of the rules against plagiarism. Johnson, who is an assistant director of faculty services at St. Leo University in Florida, says that most of the plagiarism that anti-cheating programs detect is of an unintentional rather a malicious variety, and comes about because students aren’t skilled at either paraphrasing or citing.

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