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EdTech Goes Undercover: An Insider’s View of What Students Post on Contract Cheating Sites

Amelia Pang is a journalist and an editor at EdTech: Focus on Higher Education. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, Mother Jones, and  The New York Times Sunday Review, among other publications.

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part investigation. Part 2 covers how IT departments can detect and prevent contract cheating in higher education.

“Please complete my assignment,” a student posts on a microtutoring website that universities say  facilitates contract cheating . The assignment is on the history of public health. APA format. Three sources. At least 750 words. In less than 15 minutes,  EdTech  sees a university ghostwriter accepting the assignment for $20.

There are hundreds of “homework help” websites that have seen an  exponential increase in customers  since the start of the pandemic. The services offered on sites like these typically run the gamut of legitimate tutoring to selling exam documents and answers. Some flat out offer to take an entire online course or exam for students.

The shadow industry of contract cheating falls into a legal gray area. When students and tutors make an account on a homework help site, they must sign a terms-of-service agreement and honor code that forbids academic cheating. But an undercover  EdTech  investigation found this agreement appears to be rarely enforced.

“I have definitely seen an increase in customers since the pandemic began,” Alex, an academic ghostwriter who currently works for a homework help site, tells  EdTech.  “Specifically, there has been an increase in the number of students posting that they want full online classes done for them. Most of the time, students have no problem finding a contractor.”

What Is Contract Cheating, and How Does It Work?

To avoid legal liability, some homework help sites are using automation tools to edit the language of posts. Whenever students submit a post, the first line always says something like “I need help understanding the assignment,” or “Help me learn.”

But  EdTech  saw this as mostly a cursory statement. Many students will also directly say, “Please complete my assignment.” Some even go so far as to request that the “tutor” be available at a certain date and time to take an online exam for them.

“I would say that 30 percent of the requests are for ‘help’ versus completing assignments,”  a tutor for one of these sites told BRIGHT Magazine in 2016.  “It is largely a place for students to cheat.”

When  EdTech  created a tutor account at a homework help site earlier this year, we found that not much has changed since the BRIGHT Magazine article came out five years ago.

An insider's view of what students post on contract cheating sites.

Although students are blatantly asking for “tutors” to complete assignments and exams for them,  EdTech  saw academic ghostwriters making bids and accepting the work — often within minutes.

Students Hire Academic Ghostwriters to Take Online Courses for Them

Former and current academic ghostwriters also say that taking an entire online course for students is a common practice in the industry — a practice that has existed since the inception of online education. “That was always standard operating procedure,” says Dave Tomar, a former academic ghostwriter who started his decade-long career in contract cheating in 2000. He is currently the managing editor of  Academic Influence , where he  shares his insights  on how educators can counter the surge of contract cheating during the pandemic.

“When I started doing this, I would frequently get these full online modules at the beginning of a rolling semester," Tomar says. “I got the full syllabus, and everything that I was expected to do over the next couple of months. Now, with countless students forced into remote learning, you have a whole new customer pool that is growing.”

As for how much students are willing to pay, the contractors charge “anywhere from $300 to $700 for a full class depending on the student, the subject and the difficulty,” says Alex, who currently works for a homework help site.

INSIDER EXCLUSIVE:   Read Part 2 – What can universities do about contract cheating?

Fake Tutors Entice Unknowing Students to Engage in Contract Cheating

Academic cheating sites also strongly encourage students to sell their coursework— an act that may be illegal in 17 states.

“Distributing any post-secondary assignment for a profit with reasonable knowledge that it will be submitted by another person for academic credit is a crime in many US states,” Citron Research, an investment research firm that investigates overvalued fraudulent companies, stated in  a report.

It’s a big problem for many institutions. According to Douglas Harrison, vice president and dean of the school of cybersecurity and information technology at the  University of Maryland Global Campus , some of these contract cheating websites are “facilitating massive transfers of institutional proprietary material into their file-sharing systems.”

Harrison says many students may not even realize they are cheating when they download a university’s copyrighted classroom assessment materials because these websites reframe downloading answers to tests as a form of studying or tutoring. “They reframe file-sharing as educational, even though these are behaviors that conventional norms of academic integrity would consider misconduct,” he says.

Dave Tomar former academic ghostwriter.

To make matters worse, these websites have mastered sophisticated techniques to lure unsuspecting students. Several of these prominent homework tutoring sites will offer to give students a discount if they let their academic ghostwriter have access to the online course. This often results in the contract cheater stealing other students’ personal information.

“So the contract cheater then reaches out to other students and says, ‘I’m a tutor in your course. And I’ve helped another student in your class with their assignments. Would you like a little help?’” Harrison says, describing how the contract cheater pitches cheating “services” to other students.

This can be especially confusing for students, who may not know how to tell the difference between a contract cheater and a legitimate tutor who is affiliated with the university.

“Most of the students who we find in academic misconduct settings after inappropriately using materials on these sites, they did not set out to be malicious cheaters. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t hold them accountable, but we have to hold them accountable in proportion to the root cause of the situation,” Harrison says.

Who Is Using Academic Ghostwriters?

According to the ghostwriters who are contracted to help students cheat, their customers are usually underserved students who need access to remedial courses, and nontraditional students who struggle to balance coursework with full-time employment.

“I would argue that what is facilitating the surge of contract cheating is the fact that students are increasingly desperate and lacking support,” says Tomar.

During Tomar’s time as an academic ghostwriter, he caught glimpses into their personal circumstances. “Some would tell you they are a parent working full time. And they just can’t deal with this challenge right now. Some say, ‘I’ve invested X number of dollars into this education, and I cannot afford to fail this class. But I don’t know how to do this assignment.’”

Alex mentions that many are also English language learners. “As I noted, some students are asking for whole classes to be done, and a lot of those are English or writing-intensive courses,” he says. “That does not mean that they are ESL, but [my sense is] most of them are.”

To fundamentally address the cheating pandemic, universities and colleges may need to invest in more resources for vulnerable student populations.

“It begins with figuring out who’s struggling, why they’re struggling and what we can do to help them before they end up as contract cheating customers,” Tomar says.

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When does getting help on an assignment turn into cheating?

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Students – whether at university or school – can get help from many places. They can go to a tutor, parent, teacher, a friend or consult a textbook.

But at which point does getting help cross the line into cheating?

Sometimes it’s clear. If you use a spy camera or smartwatch in an exam, you’re clearly cheating. And you’re cheating if you get a friend to sit an exam for you or write your assignment.

At other times the line is blurry. When it’s crossed, it constitutes academic misconduct. Academic misconduct is any action or attempted action that may result in creating an unfair academic advantage for yourself or others.

What about getting someone else to read a draft of your essay? What if they do more than proofread and they alter sections of an assignment? Does that constitute academic misconduct?

Learning, teaching or cheating?

There are a wide range of activities that constitute academic misconduct. These can include:

fabrication, which is just making things up. I could say “90 % of people admit to fabricating their assignments”, when this is not a fact but a statement I just invented

falsification, which is manipulating data to inaccurately portray results. This can occur by taking research results out of context and drawing conclusions not supported by data

misrepresentation, which is falsely representing yourself. Did you know I have a master’s degree from the University of Oxford on this topic? (Actually, I don’t)

plagiarism, which is when you use other people’s ideas or words without appropriate attribution. For instance, this list came from other people’s research and it is important to reference the source.

Sometimes students and teachers have different ideas of academic misconduct. One study found around 45% of academics thought getting someone else to correct a draft could constitute academic misconduct. But only 32% of students thought the same thing.

Read more: Assessment design won’t stop cheating, but our relationships with students might

In the same survey, most academics and students agreed having someone else like a parent or friend identify errors in a draft assignment, as opposed to correcting them, was fine.

Generally when a lecturer, teacher or another marker is assessing an assignment they need to establish the authenticity of the work. Authenticity means having confidence the work actually relates to the performance of the person being assessed, and not of another person.

The Australian government’s vocational education and training sector’s quality watchdog, for instance, considers authenticity as one of four so-called rules of evidence for an “effective assessment”.

The rules are:

validity, which is when the assessor is confident the student has the skills and knowledge required by the module or unit

sufficiency, which is when the quality, quantity and relevance of the assessment evidence is enough for the assessor to make a judgement

authenticity, where the assessor is confident the evidence presented for assessment is the learner’s own work

currency, where the assessor is confident the evidence relates to what the student can do now instead of some time in the past.

Generally speaking, if the assessor is confident the work is the product of a student’s thoughts and where help has been provided there is proper acknowledgement, it should be fine.

Why is cheating a problem?

It’s difficult to get a handle on how big the cheating problem is. Nearly 30% of students who responded to a 2012 UK survey agreed they had “submitted work taken wholly from an internet source” as their own.

In Australia, 6% of students in a survey of 14,000 reported they had engaged in “outsourcing behaviours” such as submitting someone else’s assignment as their own, and 15% of students had bought, sold or traded notes.

Getting someone to help with your assignment might seem harmless but it can hinder the learning process. The teacher needs to understand where the student is at with their learning, and too much help from others can get in the way.

Read more: Children learn from stress and failure: all the more reason you shouldn't do their homework

Some research describes formal education as a type of “ signal ”. This means educational attainment communicates important information about an individual to a third party such as an employer, a customer, or to an authority like a licensing body or government department. Academic misconduct interferes with that process.

How to deal with cheating

It appears fewer cheaters are getting away with it than before. Some of the world’s leading academic institutions have reported a 40% increase in academic misconduct cases over a three year period.

Technological advances mean online essay mills and “ contract cheating ” have become a bigger problem. This type of cheating involves outsourcing work to third parties and is concerning because it is difficult to detect .

Read more: 15% of students admit to buying essays. What can universities do about it?

But while technology has made cheating easier, it has also offered sophisticated systems for educators to verify the work is a person’s own. Software programs such as Turnitin can check if a student has plagiarised their assignment.

Institutions can also verify the evidence they are assessing relates to a student’s actual performance by using a range of assessment methods such as exams, oral presentations, and group assignments.

Academic misconduct can be a learning and cultural issue . Many students, particularly when they are new to higher education, are simply not aware what constitutes academic misconduct. Students can often be under enormous pressure that leads them to make poor decisions.

It is possible to deal with these issues in a constructive manner that help students learn and get the support they need. This can include providing training to students when they first enrol, offering support to assist students who may struggle, and when academic misconduct does occur, taking appropriate steps to ensure it does not happen again.

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Millions of college students use Chegg, which professors say enables cheating – and possibly blackmail

An apparent good Samaritan had bad news for math professor Juan Gutiérrez: One of his students cheated on an exam. 

The person, who identified himself as an incoming graduate student in the USA, said he helped an undergraduate on a test after the two connected online. The emailer said he worked for Chegg, a website that sells itself as a one-stop shop for collegians who need help with their studies.

Some academics and students know Chegg for another reason: claims it enables   cheating in the classroom. 

“It pains me to see students taking undue advantage of the pandemic situation to boost their GPA without putting any effort,” the emailer   told Gutiérrez. 

Gutiérrez snapped into action and got in touch with his student, who complicated the narrative.   Days earlier, the Texas student said, he had received an email threatening to disclose he had used Chegg to fraudulently complete his coursework unless he paid off the person via PayPal. 

“I have sources everywhere and understand you have an exam coming up," the threatening email read. "It will be a shame if something happened regarding the score." 

Gutiérrez was angry, but his ire probably surprised the would-be whistleblower. 

“Extorting anyone is a crime,” he wrote back. 

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Vulnerable to blackmail?

For years, professors have lamented the use of college-help websites such as Chegg in academic dishonesty. Students who use the sites, especially with their real names, make themselves vulnerable to possible attempts of blackmail, experts said. 

To Gutiérrez, chair of the mathematics department at the University of Texas, San Antonio, the possible blackmail was a far more serious issue. He told the sender, whom he suspected was an Indian national, that he had alerted the State Department. The emailer went dark, but Gutiérrez posted screenshots of the incident on Twitter with a warning to students.

Kshitij Karan, whose name was on both the threat and the note to the professor, told USA TODAY he had not sent the threatening message to the student, but he had reached out to Gutierrez. He suggested the email containing the threat had been doctored. 

The Texas undergraduate did not respond to requests for comment.

Chegg denied the student and the alleged blackmailer had met on its platform. Despite a screenshot showing a Chegg question that was referenced in emails between the two, Chegg said it could not find a record of the question being sent. 

"We immediately conducted our own internal investigation and can categorically say that we have found no evidence that this exchange took place on the Chegg platform," the company said in a statement to USA TODAY. "It is technically impossible for there to be no record of the question if it was in fact posted on our platform."

Misuse of online platforms for cheating is not unique to Chegg. The company is one of many that operate alongside the country’s higher education system without the same   rules or responsibilities colleges bear. The business started as a purveyor of textbook rentals in 2005 – a service it still offers – but added services such as writing help, test prep and other homework help. 

It had 6.6 million subscribers across 190 countries in the 2020 fiscal year, making it one of the largest education technology companies in the world. The company's market capitalization was as high as $14 billion this year but is now about $4.5 billion.  

College help is a lucrative business: Harvard grad made millions on US college admissions for international students

Chegg's test prep and homework help come either through live experts or a cache of questions from textbooks and exams. If students need help with a math problem, they can upload a photo of it to Chegg. An answer, complete with how to solve it, can come back within minutes. 

Professors said students have used the service in exams, snapping pictures surreptitiously with their phones and peeking when the answers come in.

Cheating in college is nothing new, but some feared the increased online learning spurred by the pandemic would lead to even more academic dishonesty, enabled by websites such as Chegg. 

Chegg denies that characterization and said its users agree in its terms of service not to use the platform to cheat. It cooperates with schools looking to find cheaters.

A new product, Chegg said, even allows professors to upload their tests before the scheduled exam dates. The tool prevents students from accessing the material in the given time range. 

“We constantly work to prevent misuse of our site,” the company's statement said, “including reminding subscribers about our Honor Code before they submit questions, and providing tips and information to students and faculty on how to properly use and not use Chegg services.”

What is Chegg?

Chegg, like other education technology websites, saw major growth during the pandemic as  universities were forced to pivot instruction online . A company spokesman said Chegg grew by 67% in 2020   from the previous year. 

Students can pay $15 to $20 a month to access the site.   Along with receiving help with questions from their course material, they can get help with essays, view flashcards or take practice exams. 

Company officials said they're aware some students use its services to cheat but that Chegg works with universities to try to address the behavior. David Rettinger, a professor at the University of Mary Washington who studies academic dishonesty, said Chegg is notable for its transparency and willingness to work with academic institutions compared with other sites offering similar services. 

Cheating may be on the company’s radar, but officials said it has never dealt with an accusation of extortion. 

The Texas incident, according to Gutiérrez’s account and screenshots of the alleged exchange, started on Chegg. The student told Gutiérrez he posted a question about his calculus homework involving tangent lines. The company specifically denied the existence of the post.

Two days later, the email threatening the student arrived. It read, “I posted a solution on your Chegg post a few days ago regarding tangent lines.” The sender, according to the return email, was named Kshitij Karan. 

Gutiérrez’s class had an exam that month. The email accusing the student of cheating arrived the next day, again bearing Karan's name. 

To Gutiérrez, it seems clear his student posted a question to Chegg and was blackmailed. He was further convinced when the student was able to produce Karan’s name before Gutiérrez shared it with him.

“By chance, is this regarding a person by the name of Kshitij?” the student wrote to Gutierrez on Sept. 29. “I have been getting harassed by him, but I just thought he was trying to get money out of me.” 

Don't fall for it: Scam calls sell student loan forgiveness

Karan disagrees with that account. He said he works for Chegg and other learning platforms to supplement his income.

He said he sometimes takes practice tests for students and charges them a fee for his services. In this case, Karan said, the student contacted him through Discord, a messaging app.

Karan said he completed the test as requested by the student, then realized it was a real exam. He reached out to Gutiérrez, and that’s when he said he learned of the threatening email sent to the student. He suggested the student could have doctored the sender's information.

Karan's Discord tag calls into question his account. The same username appears in multiple posts on Reddit forums where students seek others to do their assignments for pay. In one post with Karan's Discord tag, the writer identifies himself as a "verified" Chegg tutor and says he can offer help with homework, for pay. In other posts, Karan's Discord tag appears in forums with names such as "Paid homework" or "hwforcash." The latter forum bears a simple description: "Pay reddit to do your homework for you."  

Karan said he was trying to reach people who might need a tutor, not trying to complete their coursework for cash. 

Gutiérrez doesn’t buy Karan’s story. 

“Everything follows a perfect timeline,” Gutiérrez said. “And everything fits perfectly.”

Gutiérrez has been communicating with Chegg, and he described its answers as a smokescreen. He said he never claimed the incident occurred on the company’s platform. Instead, he said, the student used Chegg, then made an error by including his personal information on the website. That made him vulnerable to harassment outside the platform, Gutiérrez said. 

Chegg denied Karan has worked for its site. The company said it can't find an account tied to the student. Students often share Chegg accounts, so it can be difficult to track individual users. 

Joe Izbrand, a spokesman for the University of Texas, San Antonio, confirmed the university was aware of the incident and addressing it, but it would not provide more details in compliance with federal laws regarding students' privacy. The university released a statement saying it had "previously addressed alleged academic dishonesty incidents involving students and Chegg."

'Chegg will narc' 

In October 2020, months after the pandemic forced many classes online, Redditors on a forum for Ohio State University students had a problem. They had heard some of their peers were busted using Chegg on an organic chemistry test in April, and they weren't sure they could trust Chegg to protect their identities. 

Jake Conway, then a student   at OSU, had an idea to get to the bottom of what happened. He’d use a public records request to   ask for the emails between the professor in question, Andrea Baldwin, and Chegg.

His plan worked. He shared the documents in a post. 

The emails show Baldwin coordinated with the university’s Office of Academic Affairs to ask Chegg for the names of students who would have accessed relevant material at the time of her test. Chegg handed over   the email addresses and other non-financial   information tied to the student profiles.

Conway said he expected to learn the company shared the names and emails. He questioned how Chegg could have been sure the people listed had actually been the ones using the account since students commonly share accounts. 

Conway's takeaway was clear. He warned his classmates: “Chegg will narc you out upon request.”

To the Redditors, the solution was simple: Don’t cheat, or if you do, use a different name and email address. 

'Optional' test scores?  Colleges say SAT, ACT is optional for application, but families don’t believe them

Benjamin Johnson, an Ohio State University spokesman, confirmed that in 2020, several professors raised concerns about students using Chegg during exams and quizzes. He said the university coordinated with the company to learn which students visited the site during tests. 

Johnson stopped short of saying whether students were punished for using the site, but he did say, "Students can be charged with violating the Student Code of Conduct."

Though the university and Chegg streamlined the process for reporting academic misconduct cases, Baldwin said cheating hasn't stopped. 

Can laws stop cheating?

To deter cheating, it helps to understand its motive. Many students who cheat feel as though they can’t ask their professors for help. They may have fallen behind in their coursework and see an outsider as their only option, said Rettinger, who oversees the University of Mary Washington's academic integrity programs.

“The bulk of students make a bad choice on a bad day,” he said. “We have a responsibility to educate them.”

It’s likely students cheated more during pandemic shutdowns, Rettinger said. Students cheat, he said, when they're not engaged in their classes or suspect their professors are indifferent about them.

Cats in class, porn on Zoom: How online learning went in the early days of the pandemic

Cheating knows no nationality, and some countries have taken aggressive steps to curb the behavior. Among them is Australia, which in 2014 saw a massive cheating scandal in which students paid ghostwriters to craft their essays. 

The Australian government passed a law in 2018 aiming to stop this type of academic fraud. Its law is directed at “those who provide and advertise cheating services and not at students,” according to Australia's Department of Education, Skills and Employment.  

In Australia, cheating probably increased during pandemic shutdowns, but that's hard to quantify, said Cath Ellis, an associate dean and professor studying academic cheating at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Ellis said blackmail is a known issue in the industry, but it remains difficult to document. Even web forums focused on helping students cheat on their coursework tell potential customers to be wary of people who might extort them.  

Arc – UNSW Student Life at Ellis' institution offers guidance for those who may find themselves the target of blackmail . It stresses the university will help the victims navigate the situation but only if they're willing to admit their academic dishonesty. 

Despite the support for curbing online cheating, it's difficult to craft legislation that does so, Ellis said. Often, tutors are in different countries than the students they help. Cheating on a test isn’t a crime, so it doesn’t make sense for laws to target students. 

Instead, these types of laws have focused on intermediaries. Law prevents some essay-writing services from operating in Australia; they are legal in the USA.

Part of the challenge, Ellis said, is navigating the distinction between how companies advertise themselves and how students actually use the product.

On the front end, an essay-writing company may promise original content that students can use as their own. Yet in the fine print, they say their product is supposed to be used only as a model for learning. 

“The story they tell in the shop window," Ellis said, "is very different to the story they’re telling in the terms and conditions."

EdSurge Podcast

More students are using chegg to cheat. is the company doing enough to stop it, by jeffrey r. young     feb 23, 2021.

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This article is part of the guide: The EdSurge Podcast.

The pandemic has dramatically altered teaching and learning, and one side effect seems to be a rise in cheating on quizzes and tests, aided by websites designed to help students study.

Students were used to being watched as they took tests in-person, says Tricia Bertram Gallant, a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity and the director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California San Diego. But as courses rushed online during the pandemic, things changed. “All of a sudden,” she says, “there was temptation and opportunity that never existed for them before during exams.”

Professors are seeing cases of cheating during exams skyrocket as a result. At Boston University and at Georgia Tech , officials have launched probes since the start of the pandemic into students using study-help sites for cheating.

The biggest facilitator appears to be Chegg, which has become synonymous with cheating. Many students use the term “Chegging” when they describe turning to homework-help sites to copy down answers instead of doing work themselves. A recent investigation by Forbes magazine called Chegg a “superspreader” of cheating; a majority of the 52 students it interviewed said they used it for that purpose.

Meanwhile, business at the company is booming. Its stock price has more than tripled during the pandemic.

Is the company doing enough to keep students from misusing the service? Gallant’s group has some advice.

“If they were truly interested in academic integrity and helping institutions uphold academic integrity, and their sites are truly about helping students learn and not about cheating, then a simple delay from the time of the posting of the question and the answer of the question would help with that,” she said.

But Chegg’s head of academic relations, Candace Sue, says that would stifle appropriate uses of the service. “If a student is stuck on their homework and they need help in the moment that they’re asking, it’s really unfair in our view to make them wait for an artificial delay.”

The company did make some attempt to respond to the concern, with a new feature called Honor Shield, that asks professors to send the company questions it wants the service to block during certain exam windows.

Sue suggested we talk with students to see how they use the service. So we did.

Marjorie Blen, a junior at San Francisco State University who was one of the students we featured in our Pandemic Campus Diaries podcast series , offered her thoughts on the appeal of homework-help sites.

“I feel like it’s really unrealistic for the professors to say, ‘Don’t use this, don’t do that.’ Because we are at home. We can’t go to the library. We don’t have interactions here we can say, ‘I got this answer wrong. Can you help me?’” Blen says, adding that in some ways students are forced to teach themselves.

The tough question now is whether issues of cheating and homework-help sites will continue to flare up after the pandemic.

“I think the transition back is going to be just as hard as a transition to remote learning,” she says, since students are developing new habits.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , Stitcher , Google Play Music , or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page.

Music in this episode is “ Talltell ,” by BlueDot Sessions.

Jeffrey R. Young ( @jryoung ) is the higher education editor at EdSurge and the producer and host of the EdSurge Podcast . He can be reached at jeff [at] edsurge [dot] com.

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Why Students Cheat on Homework and How to Prevent It

One of the most frustrating aspects of teaching in today’s world is the cheating epidemic. There’s nothing more irritating than getting halfway through grading a large stack of papers only to realize some students cheated on the assignment. There’s really not much point in teachers grading work that has a high likelihood of having been copied or otherwise unethically completed. So. What is a teacher to do? We need to be able to assess students. Why do students cheat on homework, and how can we address it?

Like most new teachers, I learned the hard way over the course of many years of teaching that it is possible to reduce cheating on homework, if not completely prevent it. Here are six suggestions to keep your students honest and to keep yourself sane.

ASSIGN LESS HOMEWORK

One of the reasons students cheat on homework is because they are overwhelmed. I remember vividly what it felt like to be a high school student in honors classes with multiple extracurricular activities on my plate. Other teens have after school jobs to help support their families, and some don’t have a home environment that is conducive to studying.

While cheating is  never excusable under any circumstances, it does help to walk a mile in our students’ shoes. If they are consistently making the decision to cheat, it might be time to reduce the amount of homework we are assigning.

I used to give homework every night – especially to my advanced students. I wanted to push them. Instead, I stressed them out. They wanted so badly to be in the Top 10 at graduation that they would do whatever they needed to do in order to complete their assignments on time – even if that meant cheating.

When assigning homework, consider the at-home support, maturity, and outside-of-school commitments involved. Think about the kind of school and home balance you would want for your own children. Go with that.

PROVIDE CLASS TIME

Allowing students time in class to get started on their assignments seems to curb cheating to some extent. When students have class time, they are able to knock out part of the assignment, which leaves less to fret over later. Additionally, it gives them an opportunity to ask questions.

When students are confused while completing assignments at home, they often seek “help” from a friend instead of going in early the next morning to request guidance from the teacher. Often, completing a portion of a homework assignment in class gives students the confidence that they can do it successfully on their own. Plus, it provides the social aspect of learning that many students crave. Instead of fighting cheating outside of class , we can allow students to work in pairs or small groups  in class to learn from each other.

Plus, to prevent students from wanting to cheat on homework, we can extend the time we allow them to complete it. Maybe students would work better if they have multiple nights to choose among options on a choice board. Home schedules can be busy, so building in some flexibility to the timeline can help reduce pressure to finish work in a hurry.

GIVE MEANINGFUL WORK

If you find students cheat on homework, they probably lack the vision for how the work is beneficial. It’s important to consider the meaningfulness and valuable of the assignment from students’ perspectives. They need to see how it is relevant to them.

In my class, I’ve learned to assign work that cannot be copied. I’ve never had luck assigning worksheets as homework because even though worksheets have value, it’s generally not obvious to teenagers. It’s nearly impossible to catch cheating on worksheets that have “right or wrong” answers. That’s not to say I don’t use worksheets. I do! But. I use them as in-class station, competition, and practice activities, not homework.

So what are examples of more effective and meaningful types of homework to assign?

• Ask students to complete a reading assignment and respond in writing .
• Have students watch a video clip and answer an oral entrance question.
• Require that students contribute to an online discussion post.
• Assign them a reflection on the day’s lesson in the form of a short project, like a one-pager or a mind map.

As you can see, these options require unique, valuable responses, thereby reducing the opportunity for students to cheat on them. The more open-ended an assignment is, the more invested students need to be to complete it well.

DIFFERENTIATE

Part of giving meaningful work involves accounting for readiness levels. Whenever we can tier assignments or build in choice, the better. A huge cause of cheating is when work is either too easy (and students are bored) or too hard (and they are frustrated). Getting to know our students as learners can help us to provide meaningful differentiation options. Plus, we can ask them!

This is what you need to be able to demonstrate the ability to do. How would you like to show me you can do it?

REDUCE THE POINT VALUE

If you’re sincerely concerned about students cheating on assignments, consider reducing the point value. Reflect on your grading system.

Are homework grades carrying so much weight that students feel the need to cheat in order to maintain an A? In a standards-based system, will the assignment be a key determining factor in whether or not students are proficient with a skill?

Each teacher has to do what works for him or her. In my classroom, homework is worth the least amount out of any category. If I assign something for which I plan on giving completion credit, the point value is even less than it typically would be. Projects, essays, and formal assessments count for much more.

CREATE AN ETHICAL CULTURE

To some extent, this part is out of educators’ hands. Much of the ethical and moral training a student receives comes from home. Still, we can do our best to create a classroom culture in which we continually talk about integrity, responsibility, honor, and the benefits of working hard. What are some specific ways can we do this?

Building Community and Honestly

• Talk to students about what it means to cheat on homework. Explain to them that there are different kinds. Many students are unaware, for instance, that the “divide and conquer (you do the first half, I’ll do the second half, and then we will trade answers)” is cheating.
• As a class, develop expectations and consequences for students who decide to take short cuts.
• Decorate your room with motivational quotes that relate to honesty and doing the right thing.
• Discuss how making a poor decision doesn’t make you a bad person. It is an opportunity to grow.
• Share with students that you care about them and their futures. The assignments you give them are intended to prepare them for success.
• Offer them many different ways to seek help from you if and when they are confused.
• Provide revision opportunities for homework assignments.
• Explain that you partner with their parents and that guardians will be notified if cheating occurs.
• Explore hypothetical situations.  What if you have a late night? Let’s pretend you don’t get home until after orchestra and Lego practices. You have three hours of homework to do. You know you can call your friend, Bob, who always has his homework done. How do you handle this situation?

EDUCATE ABOUT PLAGIARISM

Many students don’t realize that plagiarism applies to more than just essays. At the beginning of the school year, teachers have an energized group of students, fresh off of summer break. I’ve always found it’s easiest to motivate my students at this time. I capitalize on this opportunity by beginning with a plagiarism mini unit .

While much of the information we discuss is about writing, I always make sure my students know that homework can be plagiarized. Speeches can be plagiarized. Videos can be plagiarized. Anything can be plagiarized, and the repercussions for stealing someone else’s ideas (even in the form of a simple worksheet) are never worth the time saved by doing so.

In an ideal world, no one would cheat. However, teaching and learning in the 21st century is much different than it was fifty years ago. Cheating? It’s increased. Maybe because of the digital age… the differences in morals and values of our culture…  people are busier. Maybe because students don’t see how the school work they are completing relates to their lives.

No matter what the root cause, teachers need to be proactive. We need to know why students feel compelled to cheat on homework and what we can do to help them make learning for beneficial. Personally, I don’t advocate for completely eliminating homework with older students. To me, it has the potential to teach students many lessons both related to school and life. Still, the “right” answer to this issue will be different for each teacher, depending on her community, students, and culture.

STRATEGIES FOR ADDRESSING CHALLENGING BEHAVIORS IN SECONDARY

You are so right about communicating the purpose of the assignment and giving students time in class to do homework. I also use an article of the week on plagiarism. I give students points for the learning – not the doing. It makes all the difference. I tell my students why they need to learn how to do “—” for high school or college or even in life experiences. Since, they get an A or F for the effort, my students are more motivated to give it a try. No effort and they sit in my class to work with me on the assignment. Showing me the effort to learn it — asking me questions about the assignment, getting help from a peer or me, helping a peer are all ways to get full credit for the homework- even if it’s not complete. I also choose one thing from each assignment for the test which is a motivator for learning the material – not just “doing it.” Also, no one is permitted to earn a D or F on a test. Any student earning an F or D on a test is then required to do a project over the weekend or at lunch or after school with me. All of this reinforces the idea – learning is what is the goal. Giving students options to show their learning is also important. Cheating is greatly reduced when the goal is to learn and not simply earn the grade.

Thanks for sharing your unique approaches, Sandra! Learning is definitely the goal, and getting students to own their learning is key.

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The Role of Reddit Communities in Enabling Contract Cheating

• First Online: 02 January 2023

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• Thomas Lancaster 14 &
• Rachel Gupta 14  

Part of the book series: Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts ((EIEC,volume 4))

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The Reddit platform offers users access to more than two million discussion forums as of 2021, each known as subreddits. The subreddits include discussions aimed at university staff and at students. The role of question-and-answer subreddits in an academic integrity setting has not been explored within the research literature, but their availability potentially provides students with the ability to commit academic misconduct.

This chapter considers how Reddit is being used by students to access contract cheating providers who are offering students unauthorised help with homework questions. The wide range of questions being asked are considered. Many homework style questions on Reddit are seen to have a mathematical base to them. An analysis of 141,136 homework help requests shows peak requests to match typical student deadlines with a spike in requests matching the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The chapter concludes by noting that other question-and-answer sites exist and are being misused by students. The chapter recommends further exploration and the use of machine learning techniques to aid in large scale data processing in the academic integrity field. A warning is also provided to be passed on to students about the risks associated with contract cheating using question-and-answer sites, including the scams in operation and the chance of being detected.

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Acknowledgements

The student partner’s contribution to this research was supported by the Imperial College London Department of Computing’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP).

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Lancaster, T., Gupta, R. (2022). The Role of Reddit Communities in Enabling Contract Cheating. In: Bjelobaba, S., Foltýnek, T., Glendinning, I., Krásničan, V., Dlabolová, D.H. (eds) Academic Integrity: Broadening Practices, Technologies, and the Role of Students. Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16976-2_19

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Pippa Biddle

AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

Denise Garcia knows that her students sometimes cheat, but the situation she unearthed in February seemed different. A math teacher in West Hartford, Connecticut, Garcia had accidentally included an advanced equation in a problem set for her AP Calculus class. Yet somehow a handful of students in the 15-person class solved it correctly. Those students had also shown their work, defeating the traditional litmus test for sussing out cheating in STEM classrooms.

Garcia was perplexed, until she remembered a conversation from a few years earlier. Some former students had told her about an online tool called Wolfram|Alpha that could complete complicated calculations in seconds. It provided both the answers and the steps for reaching them, making it virtually undetectable when copied as homework.

For years, students have turned to CliffsNotes for speedy reads of books, SparkNotes to whip up talking points for class discussions, and Wikipedia to pad their papers with historical tidbits. But today’s students have smarter tools at their disposal—namely, Wolfram|Alpha, a program that uses artificial intelligence to perfectly and untraceably solve equations. Wolfram|Alpha uses natural language processing technology, part of the AI family, to provide students with an academic shortcut that is faster than a tutor, more reliable than copying off of friends, and much easier than figuring out a solution yourself.

Since its release, Wolfram|Alpha has trickled through the education system, finding its way into the homework of college and high school students. Use of Wolfram|Alpha is difficult to trace, and in the hands of ambitious students, its perfect solutions are having unexpected consequences. It works by breaking down the pieces of a question, whether a mathematical problem or something like "What is the center of the United States?", and then cross-referencing those pieces against an enormous library of datasets that is constantly being expanded. These datasets include information on geodesic schemes, chemical compounds, human genes, historical weather measurements, and thousands of other topics that, when brought together, can be used to provide answers.

The system is constrained by the limits of its data library: It can’t interpret every question. It also can’t respond in natural language, or what a human would recognize as conversational speech. This is a stumbling block in AI in general. Even Siri, which relies heavily on Mathematica—another Wolfram Research product and the engine behind Wolfram|Alpha—can only answer questions in programmed response scripts, which are like a series of Mad Libs into which it plugs answers before spitting them out of your speaker or onto your screen.

Using Wolfram|Alpha is similar to executing a Google search, but Wolfram|Alpha delivers specific answers rather than endless pages of potentially relevant results. Anyone can go to the Wolfram|Alpha website, type a question or equation into a dialogue box, hit enter, and receive an answer. If you’re trying to solve x2 + 5x + 6 = 0, Wolfram|Alpha will give you the root plot, alternate forms, and solutions. If you are looking for a step-by-step explanation, there is a pro version available for $6.99/month with discounted options for students and educators.

I first heard about Wolfram|Alpha in my parents' kitchen. My father had come home from his job at a private school in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He dropped his bag on the floor, and asked me what I thought about Wolfram|Alpha. Earlier that day he had been confronted by STEM teachers who were frustrated with their students' use of the tool. It was, they said, blatant cheating. My father had left the office unsure of how to proceed. Should the school crack down on Wolfram|Alpha? Or did the school need to catch up to this new beat in education?

By Carlton Reid

By Emily Mullin

By Andy Greenberg

By Scott Gilbertson

I’d never heard of it, but a quick post to Facebook revealed that many of my friends had—especially those studying math. Some had used it to get through college calculus, while a few were still using it at their jobs as engineers or quantitative analysts. The rise of Wolfram|Alpha had completely passed over my humanities-minded head, just as, for millions of minds, it had become ubiquitous. Turning to the tech for answers was, they said, normal. At the same time, all made it clear that they didn’t want their use of Wolfram|Alpha to be made public.

Though Wolfram|Alpha was designed to be an educational asset — a way to explore an equation from within— academia has found itself at a loss over how to respond. What some call cheating, others have heralded as a massive step forward in how we learn, what we teach, and what education is even good for. They say that Wolfram|Alpha is the future. Unsurprisingly, its creator agrees.

Stephen Wolfram, the mind behind Wolfram|Alpha, can’t do long division and didn’t learn his times tables until he’d hit 40. Indeed, the inspiration for Wolfram|Alpha, which he released in 2009, started with Wolfram’s own struggles as a math student. Growing up, Wolfram’s obsession was physics. By 12, he’d written a dictionary on physics, by his early teens he’d churned out three (as yet unpublished) books, and by 15 he was publishing scientific papers.

Despite his wunderkind science abilities, math was a constant stumbling block. He could come up with concepts, but executing calculations was hard. His solution was to get his hands on a computer. By programming it to solve equations and find patterns in data, he could leave the math to the machine and focus his brain on the science. It worked. In 1981, Wolfram became the youngest person to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship. He was only 21.

Yet the tool that helped Wolfram build his reputation with physics ended up pulling him away from science. Wolfram became obsessed with complex systems and how computers could be used to study them. Five years after receiving his MacArthur Fellowship, Wolfram began developing Mathematica, and in 1988 Wolfram Research announced the release of its flagship product.

Wolfram never planned for his tool to become highbrow CliffsNotes, but he’s not too concerned about it, either. “Mechanical math,” Wolfram argues, “is a very low level of precise thinking.” Instead, Wolfram believes that we should be emphasizing computational thinking —something he describes as “trying to formulate your thoughts so that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer.” This has also been called computer-based math. Essentially, knowing algebra in today’s technology-saturated world won’t get you very far, but knowing how to ask a computer to do your algebra will. If students are making this shift, in his mind, they’re just ahead of the curve.

Alan Joyce, the director of content development for Wolfram Alpha, says that cheating is “absolutely the wrong way to look at what we do.” But the staff understands what might make teachers uncomfortable. Historically, education had to emphasize hand calculations, says John Dixon, a program manager at Wolfram Research. That’s because there wasn’t tech to fall back on and, when tech did start to appear, it wasn’t reliable. Only recently can computers calculate things automatically and precisely, and it’ll take some time for curriculums, and the teachers that are beholden to them, to catch up. Wolfram Research, Dixon says, wants to engage with teachers like Garcia, who are frustrated by the tool, to help them understand how it can help their students.

Indeed, the people who are directing the tool’s development view it as an educational equalizer that can give students who don’t have at-home homework helpers—like tutors or highly educated and accessible parents—access to what amounts to a personal tutor. It also has enormous potential within the classroom. A "show steps" button, which reveals the path to an answer, allows teachers to break down the components of a problem, rather than getting bogged down in mechanics. The "problem generator" can pull from real datasets to create relevant examples. “When you start to show educators the potential,” Dixon says, “you can see points where their eyes light up.”

For every teacher who’s converted to Dixon’s camp, there are multitudes of students who have been there for a while. As Alexander Feiner, an aspiring engineer and high school freshman told me, Wolfram|Alpha is a study aid, not a way of avoiding work — something that Dixon insists is the norm when it comes to out-of-classroom student use.

Still, the prevailing notion that Wolfram|Alpha is a form of cheating doesn’t appear to be dissipating. Much of this comes down to what homework is. If the purpose of homework is build greater understanding of concepts as presented in class, Joyce is adamant that teachers should view Wolfram|Alpha as an asset. It’s not that Wolfram Alpha has helped students “‘get through’ a math class by doing their homework for them,” he says, “but that we helped them actually understand what they were doing” in the first place. Dixon believes that Wolfram|Alpha can build confidence in students who don’t see themselves as having mathematical minds. Homework isn’t really about learning to do a calculation, but rather about learning to find and understand an answer regardless of how the calculation is executed.

That’s the route down which education appears to be headed. Once upon a time, education was all about packing as much information as possible into a human brain. Information was limited and expensive, and the smartest people were effectively the deepest and most organized filing cabinets. Today, it’s the opposite.“The notion of education as a transfer of information from experts to novices—and asking the novices to repeat that information, regurgitate it on command as proof that they have learned it—is completely disconnected from the reality of 2017,” says David Helfand, a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University.

The technology isn’t going anywhere: Like copying out of the back of a book or splitting a problem set among friends, students aren’t likely to stop using Wolfram|Alpha just because a teacher says so. Even Garcia can see a future where Wolfram|Alpha fits in. “I think, in an ideal world, teachers, myself included, need to do a better job of incorporating technology…and finding ways of using it in productive ways,” she says.

Just as robotics has transformed manufacturing, tools like Wolfram|Alpha are forcing us to rethink an educational system by challenging it to rise to the new technological standard. Either we reshape our schools to embrace tools like Wolfram|Alpha, or we risk becoming living artifacts in a rapidly progressing world.

Nilesh Christopher

Kathy Gilsinan

Steven Levy

Brendan I. Koerner

Insights from an expert in academic integrity, computer science and higher education

Contract Cheating and Unauthorised Homework Assistance through Reddit Communities

The sheer number of different sources that students can use for contract cheating always amazes me. One of my Imperial College London undergraduate students, Rahul Gupta, asked if he could work with me on a study about contract cheating using Reddit. We were able to get internal funding, collected data and Rahul joined me to present the results at the European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021.

Reddit is an interesting site to look into, as essentially it’s the host of a lot of online communities, primarily text-based, often highly active and often accessed anonymously. It is perhaps unsurprising that we found examples of students asking for homework assistance , both with money exchanged and for free.

You can see the slides we used below (and also on my SlideShare account ).

The sheer number of requests many of the subreddits (individual forums) generate is outstanding. We focused on one such subreddit which is generating over 50,000 posts per year. Not all posts are homework, since these posts also includes replies and discussion, but the high volume of posts also has a viral effect , generating more content to be indexed by Google and therefore driving more traffic from students who are looking for help and support.

Rahul and I hope to present this more formally through other academic channels, but we do encourage other educators to explore Reddit and see the range of questions and cheating opportunities that are out there. Rahul highlighted the wide range of Maths solutions available and a growth in activity during the Covid-19 period ( echoing findings from a study I completed with Codrin Cotarlan ).

The use of an anonymous service like Reddit is not risk free for anyone involved. Rahul highlighted examples of students being scammed and at risk of blackmail , even if they only posted and did not pay anyone, but he also showed that assignments providers were equally at risk, with students using various tricks to get them to complete work for free.

Perhaps most importantly, Rahul talked about being able to identify some of the students and how he had reported them to their universities. He said he had mostly had receptive responses at the news from UK and European universities, but had had less success communicating with universities in the United States. The message to communicate is that contract cheating is not a good option. Other students do care about academic integrity .

My friend and colleague, the late Robert Clarke, spent many years of his life tracking down contract cheating cases and I know that he would be impressed and proud of the work that Rahul and other student academic integrity advocates are doing .

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Teacher goes viral on Reddit for showing how they caught students cheating

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"They had all secretly copied each other's work and played the telephone game by accident."

By Christina Marfice May 23, 2024

In the age of ChatGPT, teachers need to have eyes like hawks to watch for students who use unscrupulous methods to do their schoolwork. But sometimes, even in the age of technology, kids turn to more old-fashioned methods of getting the answers without doing the work. That’s what a high school science teacher shared in a viral Reddit post about catching a group of students cheating in a surprisingly low-tech way.

The teacher, who goes by Miss Storey, said she teaches 9th-grade chemistry in Oklahoma. In her post, she shared a video showing the moment she spotted something a little unusual about three of her students’ assignments.

A kid wrote “Couldn’t have existed” on his chemistry homework. I was worried till I found the telephone game these kids were playing when copying their homework. by u/ReignofKindo25 in mildlyinfuriating

The question the students were asked was, “What causes the trend in acidic/basic oxides?”

Storey told Newsweek that one of the first things she noticed was a student who answered that they “couldn’t have existed,” an answer that just didn’t make any sense. 

Related: Postpartum mom wonders if she’s wrong for refusing to see her body-shaming MIL

“I was going to see if he was OK the next day at school,” she said. “But then I saw the other papers.”

While reviewing the rest of the class’ assignments, Storey saw that another student had answered that question by writing, “covalent bonds are acidic.” A third student had written, confusingly, “covalent bonds are existed.”

Suddenly, everything clicked and she figured out what had happened. 

“They had all secretly copied each other’s work and played the telephone game by accident,” Storey said.

And when you think about it, that does make sense. The first student wrote that “covalent bonds are acidic.” The second student probably misheard that answer and wrote that “covalent bonds are existed.” The third student was the one whose paper Storey saw first, who got the message the most twisted.

A recent study  from researchers at Stanford reveals the percentage of high school students who cheat surprisingly remains statistically unchanged compared to previous years without ChatGPT. The university, which conducted an anonymous survey among students at 40 US high schools, found about 60% to 70% of students have engaged in cheating behavior in the last month, a number that is the same or even decreased slightly since the debut of ChatGPT, according to the researchers.

“While there are individual alarming cases in the news about AI being used for cheating, we are seeing little evidence that the needle has moved for high schoolers overall,” Victor Lee, Stanford’s faculty lead for AI and education who helped oversee the survey, told CNN .

While it’s understandably upsetting to educators when students are dishonest with their work, it’s a far more common occurrence in high school-aged students vs. elementary.

According to a recent survey conducted by plagiarismcheck.org , 75-98% of the surveyed students confess that they started cheating in high school.  The tendency proves the pivotal role of establishing writing and studying ethics from an early age since students who start cheating at school continue it at college and even influence younger learners in elementary classes. Moreover, in the first study year, 59% of students admitted cheating. In the second, the number in the same group reached 95%.

Related: Reddit dad asks if he’s wrong for sticking to his daughter’s potty training routine on vacation

Storey was not surprised to discover students copying each other. “They always copy,” she said to Newsweek. “It was more upsetting in the beginning, as this was my first year teaching. By the time I graded those papers, I expect to see copying.”

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11 Ways to Prevent Cheating with WebAssign

WebAssign is a flexible platform that allows you to customize the student experience to make cheating far more difficult than traditional paper and pen homework assignments.

In this article, we present a number of options to prevent students from comparing answers, using outside resources and looking up answers. Plus, you can find helpful tips to check for signs of cheating in your course.

Keep reading for 11 ways to prevent cheating and encourage academic honesty in your course using WebAssign .

Help Students Take Responsibility for their Academic Integrity

1) give students an introductory assignment on academic honesty.

Make sure students understand the different forms of academic integrity by checking their understanding at the beginning of the semester. Found within the Math Success toolkit under free additional resources , you can assign the Academic Integrity assignment which will engage students in the meaning and different forms of academic integrity with an opportunity to reflect on how it may impact their education.

2) Ask Students to Sign a Pledge Before Taking an Exam

As an added layer of security, it can also help to ask students to sign a pledge confirming that they will not cheat on an exam. To do this, you can assign an Honor Code question at the beginning of the exam as a pledge of academic honesty. You can use Honor Code question ID: 4625294 as a starting point.

Prevent Students from Comparing Answers

3) display questions one at a time.

Assignment settings allow you to show your students all questions at once, or to only display questions one at a time. Showing all questions in the assignment at once gives students the opportunity to compare assignments with others by scrolling through all questions to search for matching or similar problems. If you change the display method to show only one question at a time, it’s harder to make those comparisons.

4) Use Randomized Value Questions

Many questions in WebAssign include randomizations that show the same question with different values to each student. Although each student will receive a similar question, they’ll be working with different values and will not be able to share answers. You can enable question randomization within the assignment settings. If a problem does not include any randomizations, you’ll see a note under the question while adding it within the Question Browser.

5) Use Question Pools

Question pools introduce additional randomization beyond question values by providing every student with a varied question set. You can create a larger subset of questions, then set a fixed number of questions from that pool to be assigned to each student at random. Question pools are accessed from the Question Browser within the Assignment Editor.

Pro Tip: Make sure to pool questions of similar difficulty. Question difficulty is provided for each question including usage to show the percentage of students who got the question right on the first try.

6) Randomize Question Order

WebAssign assignment settings allows you to randomize the order of questions or choose the order manually. To prevent cheating, the randomization option limits the ability for students to find another student with the same set of questions in the same order to copy from.

Limit Answer Lookup

7)  use new questions from term to term.

To prevent students who have previously taken a course from sharing test questions or information with current students, you can take advantage of the huge volume of textbook questions available in the question browser and build an updated version of the exam.

Pro Tip : Save time and share questions and assignments with fellow instructors to further expand the variety of content you can pull from.

8) Hide Question Name from Students

The question name is a string of characters that indicate its location in the textbook. Some students may use this information to check the textbook solutions for the answer (if available). Hiding the question name deters this practice, plus students will have limited opportunities to find the answer if you’ve randomized the question values as suggested in tip #2 above.

9) Turn Off Randomized Text Highlighting

In randomized questions, values or words within the problem that differ from student to student are highlighted in red. You can turn off highlighting to make it harder for students to compare differences between questions with each other.

Prevent Use of Outside Resources

10) use a secure environment.

You have several options to establish a secure testing environment for students. You can:

• Ensure students work only from designated environments by adding location restrictions to assignments that allow or disallow specific IP addresses.
• Password-protect an assignment and distribute the password at the beginning of the assignment. You can change the password after students have begun the assignment. This prevents students from leaving the testing environment and then accessing the questions from another location.

11) Use Lockdown Browser

You can restrict the computer activities of your students while they are working on a test by requiring that the assignment be opened with LockDown Browser . While an assignment is open in LockDown Browser, students cannot use any other applications on their computer including the additional internet windows. However, this solution will not prevent students from accessing resources on their mobile devices, so a proctor may be necessary as additional security.

How to Check for Cheating

First, make sure your students are aware you’re putting measures in place to encourage academic honesty, which tends to curb cheating attempts. To follow up on your cheating prevention tactics, you can also utilize student log files that provide very specific information for instructors on how students have completed an assignment. Log files contain IP information to show from where an assignment was downloaded and submitted—and timestamps each submission. This allows you to easily view how long each student took to complete an assignment and weed out those who may be using dishonest practices.

Log files may be compared side by side for similarities across students. For additional information, you can compare responses data from students to see if correct/incorrect responses match in patterns that resemble cheating students.

Key Takeaways

• Make students take ownership of their own academic integrity with a reflective assignment and honor code question.
• Deter your students from comparing answers by utilizing the variety of customizable options in your assignment settings to make each student’s assignment unique, while covering the same concepts.
• Make it harder for your students to look up answers to your assignments by using new questions, hiding question names and randomizing question values so they don’t match the textbook solutions.
• Add a layer of security to your assignments with location and password restrictions or use the LockDown browser.
• Identify cheating quickly by reviewing student activity and comparing student responses.

Looking for More Tips?

Transitioning to a virtual or hybrid course especially mid semester can be stressful – let us help! Keep in mind the following resources that are available to you.

• Watch the recording  of “Top 5 Features You Aren’t Using in WebAssign” webinar
• Searchable  WebAssign Help  for step-by-step how-to’s and tutorials
• WebAssign  quick start guides  for faculty and students
• Twitter.com/WebAssign
• Facebook.com/WebAssign

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Is it cheating for students to use homework apps?

By Amy Iverson

Apps now exist in our digital world that can take nearly any homework question or problem and solve it instantly, leaving parents and students with the decision whether or not to use these apps. Some call it cheating; others call it learning.

Parents, think back to when you were in high school doing homework. I recall having complicated calculus assignments that my mom wouldn’t even attempt and that stumped my father, who was an engineer. He would spend the evening reading through my book to remember how to do the equations and then try to teach me.

Even now with my teenagers, I have to study before I can help them with their math homework. And I’ll admit that most often, I send them to my husband who has a better mind for such things. I can help them with any literature, English, or language, but math was never my forte. So, I started getting help for teaching my kids from an app I featured on my radio show years ago.

The photomath app is a simple and genius concept. You point your phone’s camera at any math problem and the app gives you detailed instructions on how to solve it. And it’s free. So if students use this to do their homework, is that considered cheating?

It definitely could be. But it could also be a wonderful teaching tool, especially for students who are good independent learners. Apps like this could also be amazing for a student who doesn’t mesh well with a certain educator’s teaching style. Students can visualize how to solve the problems on their own timeline and terms.

Students have a teacher to answer questions while at school, but what are they supposed to do when they are at home? Sure, a parent may be able to help, but there's also the possibility that their parents never finished high school.

Recently, the app Socratic sat atop the list of the App Store’s Free Education apps. It works a lot like photomath, but for many different subjects. Again, you scan any question with your phone and the app gives you the answer.

The question may be from English class, “How is antithesis different from paradox?” Socratic will give you the perfect answer. That example may not be much different than just Googling the question. But the creators of this app took hundreds of thousands of student-submitted questions and had teachers break them down into core concepts.

After months of refining the algorithms, Socratic’s artificial intelligence can predict which ones a student needs to learn to solve the problem. The app’s website has this example of an organic chemistry question, “How is acetophenone phenylhydrazone catalyzed into 2-phenylindole?”

Now, if my child came to me with that homework question, I would likely fall on the floor laughing. But besides artificial intelligence, this app has carefully chosen real life Socratic Heroes like Ernest Z. to answer questions.

He’s a retired professor from Acadia University who taught organic chemistry for two decades. Ernest Z. has been with Socratic for three years and in this case gives a perfectly explained solution to that question with step-by-step instructions.

Cheating? I say learning. Professor Christopher Boyle, a psychologist and teacher based at Exeter University, agrees, saying this app could be an excellent tool .

The app’s co-founder, Shreyans Bhansali, believes kids are asking Google all their homework questions anyway . He says at least Socratic goes a step further by teaching students what they need to know to answer the questions.

A final example of homework helper apps is Brainly . This website and app uses crowdsourcing to answer homework questions. It’s like a gigantic worldwide study group. Brainly believes students are smarter together and uses the tagline, “No one knows everything, but everyone knows something.”

Students can post questions about assignments and a fellow student will answer within minutes. You can also search millions of previous questions and answers. Moderators make sure all the questions are school related and that answers aren’t copied from other websites.

Like most technology, parents will need to monitor their kids using these apps. Students could definitely just use them to copy down correct answers for their homework. But everyone would know the truth once test time rolled around. If students use these apps to learn concepts and problem-solving — ideally with help from parents — they could be a huge asset in a student’s path to a diploma.

Amy Iverson is a graduate of the University of Utah. She has worked as a broadcast journalist in Dallas, Seattle, Italy, and Salt Lake City. Amy, her husband, and three kids live in Summit County, Utah. Contact Amy on Facebook.com/theamyiverson