Reducing Student Cheating in Online Courses

In this Education Week article, Katie Ash reports on ways to curb cheating, plagiarism, and excessive parental help in online courses. Students at the Virtual High School in Prince William County, VA, which delivered 1,400 online courses last year, do most of their work on home computers, but there’s one exception: “We make them come in face to face to do their high-stakes exams,” says coordinator Gina Jones. That includes midterms, final exams, and state tests. 

Most of Prince William County’s online students attend a bricks-and-mortar school and use online courses to fill gaps in their requirements. Full-time online schools, like Commonwealth Connects Academy and the Arizona Virtual Academy, have different policies, enlisting parents or guardians as facilitators and bringing them in for training on when to help their children and when to stand back – for example, when an adaptive assessment needs to use a student’s wrong answers to find his or her learning level. Here are six tips for ensuring that online students do their own work:

• Clearly state the school’s honor code and teach it to students and to those who will be working with each student. Adults need to know when helping a child is permissible and when it isn’t.
• Encourage communication among parents, teachers, and students to prevent problems before they start.
• Make sure online teachers have frequent, consistent communication with students and adult helpers. Frequent face-to-face or Skype conferences with students help online teachers keep tabs on a student’s level of understanding.
• Frequently require students to turn in written work, which can serve as a baseline for evaluating performance on tests.
• Run written assignments through plagiarism-detection software like www.turnitin.com. 
• Require students to travel to secure sites where they can be monitored taking tests and high-stakes assessments.

Still, cheating can happen. One Prince William student said, “Kids cheat all the time. They could be doing it right in front of a teacher’s desk or in front of their own computer. It depends on what kind of kid you are.” 

“Virtual Educators Work to Protect Academic Integrity” by Katie Ash in Education Week, Sept. 11, 2013 (Vol. 33, #3, p. 13), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #502