What’s to Be Done?
School responses to cheating generally fall into two buckets: addressing the cause or toggling the incentives.
In the equation previously described—high desire plus easy routes plus few disincentives—solutions that focus on the cause of the misbehavior try to create scenarios in which students no longer have a desire to cheat. Mollie K. Galloway of Lewis & Clark College argues that we must create schools and communities that “value academic achievement and credentialing” over and above “learning or development.” To do so, communities need to “explore how definitions of success are historically and culturally embedded” and redefine “what they mean by success.” These lofty goals may be easier to write about than they are to achieve.
In practice, such calls often result in nothing more than a lowering of standards. An Edutopia article, for example, implores teachers to use homework passes and forgo formal exams. If work is more meaningful—prioritizing projects and essays over tests and repetitive practice—students will realize the importance of the activities and so develop an intrinsic motivation toward learning that supersedes (or at least counterbalances) their desire for extrinsic rewards.
Such recommendations are without doubt misguided. When I pitched this idea to Trevor Bohn, an English teacher in Potosi, Wisconsin, he said even if teachers’ expectations for students are reasonable, “life is stressful. If we are teaching kids properly, they should be developing resilience to cope with the stress.” And George Mooren asserted that no matter how meaningful a teacher tries to make the work, some kids will always want to cheat. If you give them choices over their assignments or allow them to opt for projects instead of tests, students always “pick the easiest option,” he said.
Ultimately, effective learning is inherently effortful. Humans are primed to learn a few things naturally—spoken language and gross motor movements, for example—but academic content requires focus, attention, and study. And a recent meta-analysis found that most people don’t much enjoy difficult thinking any more than they enjoy hill sprints, push-ups, or eating their spinach. Understood in this light, recommendations to make learning more meaningful or less stressful necessitate making it less effective.
Moreover, as noted earlier, students have multifarious reasons for cheating. We cannot hope to create some utopian environment that addresses them all. Schools cannot control student motivations, but they can toggle incentives and policies to alter behavior. Accordingly, they must both make cheating more difficult and provide disincentives to steer students away from it.
JR Mooren described how some teachers at his school are thinking outside the box to create cheating-proof assignments. Keeping students from cheating during tests is easiest. Teachers can simply ban phones and computers. JR assured me that students can still find ways to cheat during paper tests, but it’s harder to do so. It’s more difficult to see a classmate’s test several desks away or slip in an answer key in unnoticed. And if teachers create multiple versions tests, answer keys won’t help a student cheat.
Both Mooren boys noted that tests are the best method to winnow out which students have legitimately completed homework and daily activities and which have cheated their way through the unit or semester. The students who cheat on practice problems bomb the test, because they haven’t actually learned the material.
These scenarios require that teachers actively monitor test-taking. If educators sit behind their desks grading papers, it reopens an easy pathway to cheating. In one interesting small study, researcher Jarret Dyer found that proctored environments at the post-secondary level reduced the prevalence of cheating. No surprise there. But students in proctored settings were more likely to state on surveys that cheating was unacceptable. Active monitoring and enforcement communicated to students that a teacher or school really believed that cheating was unethical, and students accepted the message.
According to the Mooren boys, students at their school are now required to complete essays in person, on demand, and by hand.
There are ways to check for AI usage when students write essays outside of class. When I was teaching, I’d ask a student I suspected of using ChatGPT to define a few of the “big words” they’d used in an essay. Editing history in Google Docs can expose a student who copied and pasted their essay. AI-checking software does exist.
All of these methods are imperfect, though. A student may use a thesaurus to find a fancy word and subsequently forget its meaning. Students can type out a ChatGPT essay word by word rather than cutting and pasting it from a browser. And AI-checking software is notorious for false positives. With such imperfect detection methods, it’s almost impossible to accuse a student of academic dishonesty on essay writing with certainty. The only way to ensure students complete an essay themselves is to do it the old-fashioned—dare I say Jesuit?—way.
Other kinds of homework are harder nuts to crack. How can a teacher know for sure that kids are answering questions or completing problem sets themselves? Still, many teachers are finding ways to assign homework that’s difficult to cheat on. The Mooren boys told me about teachers who assign readings or even pre-recorded lectures and explanations as homework—a variation on the flipped classroom—and follow up with mini-quizzes the next day for accountability. For example, a teacher may assign a reading on the tale of Narcissus and open the next class with a quick, five-question quiz or a free-response question, allowing students to use notes they took. Or a teacher may model in a video how to complete a physics problem, which students must then complete in class.
On top of such practices, it’s also imperative that students face some sort of consequence if they’re caught cheating. The standard teacher line is that any child caught cheating will receive a zero, no exceptions. Both JR and George told me that many of their teachers threatened such consequences. But both also told me that they had never actually seen a teacher pull a student’s test and assign a zero. As a student, I remember hearing that line, and as a teacher, I heard colleagues boast about their stringent cheating rules—but they rarely enforced them. A student told one surveyor that most students don’t know “what the consequences are,” because “not a lot of people who have cheated have faced the consequences.”
Instead of using drastic measures, teachers would do well to remember the admonition of Alexis de Tocqueville that “when justice is more certain and more mild, it is more efficacious.” If students face steep but unlikely consequences, the incentives to cheat remain high. They risk getting a zero, but the likelihood of their being caught is close to nil, so why not? Surely, if a teacher finds clear evidence that a student copied—I found sample essays online that my students turned in as their own—a teacher can assign a zero. But if there’s light chatter during a test, or a student is caught looking about, teachers can dock individual points from students’ scores—consequences that are certain but mild—to make disincentives more effective.
Honor codes are also a common school response to cheating. Some research has found no correlation between the presence of honor codes and rates of cheating at schools, but other studies are more promising. Ultimately, honor codes are most effective when schools and teachers not only post the codes, but also teach about them, discuss them with students, refer to them, and ultimately enforce them. The goal is to shift student perceptions and beliefs about cheating, which requires a school to follow through on its code of conduct.
Ultimately, combatting cheating requires a multifaceted approach. It all comes back to the incentives equation. There are simply too many reasons students cheat to sufficiently address them all. We cannot create a kumbaya environment where no kid ever wants to copy homework or peep at another kid’s test. Instead, schools and teachers must make it more difficult to cheat. That means rethinking homework, returning to handwritten tests, emphasizing end-of-course exams, and banning phones, tablets, and laptops during assessment or work time. And schools must implement and administer consequences when students are caught.
If the punishment for cheating is “certain but mild,” a student’s cost-benefit analysis changes. Cheating requires far more effort and risk to achieve an increasingly uncertain end. Certainly, some students will still try to behave dishonestly, but far more will follow the more arduous but preferable path: actually learning the content.
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School improvement is an incremental game. There never has been and never will be any policy that will alone bring about some educational utopia. Instead, an effective reform agenda needs an “all of the above” approach to move the dial on student achievement higher and higher, little by little. Curtailing academic dishonesty in schools will not fix American education. But it’s a surmountable problem with easily implemented policy solutions that will surely nudge our nation’s students toward greater learning. There’s no cheat code to make it easier.
