Just how far will they go to cheat....
After reading this article this week I really thought it was time to write a blog on how to deal with cheating and how cheating affects pedagogical strategies.
I must admit that I was shocked at just how far students are willing to go cheat on exams, tests, and assignments. If it has come to the point that we need hand scanners to avoid cheating, we have definitely taken a wrong turn pedagogically. I more than understand the pressure that something like the GMAT, GRE, or LSAT involves. This one test determines the course of your educational future. However this is one of the many reasons why standardized testing, in my opinion, is very faulty. Not everyone learns and retains in the same way, therefore making students take a test that requires every student to learn in the absolute similar manner is bound to be an exercise in futility. Not only do standardized test tend to be elitist, racist, and gender biased, therefore necessarily leaving students behind that would make excellent lawyers, grad students, etc. but they also create a ridiculous sense of anxiety leading to test takers going to extreme measures to pass.
So what is the alternative to these standardized tests? How do we avoid the invasion of privacy that has been put in place to avoid cheating on these tests? What about other forms of cheating, plagiarism, etc.?
I have seen some pretty ridiculous cheating in my time as an educator. From a student taping their notes as an audio file and replaying them on their ipod during an exam, to blatant plagiarism involving cut&paste from various websites, cheating has seemingly increased with the evolution of the sense of "entitlement" some students have. Proper documentation procedures are not being taught, students are encouraged to cut corners, in fact a nice article in the Toronto Star the other day (seen here), suggests that even cursive handwriting is becoming a thing of the past.
So what can we do as educators to deter cheating? What can we do as educators to offer an alternative to standardized testing?
I have always been a fan of alternative assignments. Some students will benefit from assignments that are not simply the 5-10 page research essay, but rather a performative assignment that involves both knowledge of the text covered as well as creative application of this knowledge. Some examples include, write a screenplay based on the text you have just read, find media/use different types of media to explain the themes that are shown in the text, or even a cooperative (group) performance piece .
These kinds of assignments are difficult to plagiarize and involve the type of thought and application of knowledge that far surpasses things like passage recognition tests and comparison essays. The necessary huge benefit of assignments like these is that it is open to interpretation, thus is an ethical pedagogical strategy that is inclusive to all students in the class.
But how do we apply this type of ethical assignment to something as massive and pedagogically ingrained as standardized testing? This will be a slow process that will require the involvement of many levels of government as well as individual universities and colleges. I think the first step would be to identify the individual skill sets that each of these professions require (lawyer, doctor, etc.). From there assignments that highlight these skills should be assigned, the caveat to these assignments would be that they need to be completed within a certain time frame (1 day, a few hours) and everyone would be working on this assignment within this "test" space. You go into this "test" in the morning and by the time the day is over it is completed, just like a GRE, GMAT, or LSAT. The difference here is that each student would be allowed to highlight their own individual strengths and ability to apply their knowledge and skills to it regardless of age, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender. Pipe dream? Possibly. Logistical nightmare? Possibly. Feasible solution? Definitely, it would only need the levels of government and post secondary institutions who maintain the outline for the pedagogical spaces our students inhabit to have an open mind and the desire to create more inclusive and less white heterosexual male standardized exams.
I must admit that I was shocked at just how far students are willing to go cheat on exams, tests, and assignments. If it has come to the point that we need hand scanners to avoid cheating, we have definitely taken a wrong turn pedagogically. I more than understand the pressure that something like the GMAT, GRE, or LSAT involves. This one test determines the course of your educational future. However this is one of the many reasons why standardized testing, in my opinion, is very faulty. Not everyone learns and retains in the same way, therefore making students take a test that requires every student to learn in the absolute similar manner is bound to be an exercise in futility. Not only do standardized test tend to be elitist, racist, and gender biased, therefore necessarily leaving students behind that would make excellent lawyers, grad students, etc. but they also create a ridiculous sense of anxiety leading to test takers going to extreme measures to pass.
So what is the alternative to these standardized tests? How do we avoid the invasion of privacy that has been put in place to avoid cheating on these tests? What about other forms of cheating, plagiarism, etc.?
I have seen some pretty ridiculous cheating in my time as an educator. From a student taping their notes as an audio file and replaying them on their ipod during an exam, to blatant plagiarism involving cut&paste from various websites, cheating has seemingly increased with the evolution of the sense of "entitlement" some students have. Proper documentation procedures are not being taught, students are encouraged to cut corners, in fact a nice article in the Toronto Star the other day (seen here), suggests that even cursive handwriting is becoming a thing of the past.
So what can we do as educators to deter cheating? What can we do as educators to offer an alternative to standardized testing?
I have always been a fan of alternative assignments. Some students will benefit from assignments that are not simply the 5-10 page research essay, but rather a performative assignment that involves both knowledge of the text covered as well as creative application of this knowledge. Some examples include, write a screenplay based on the text you have just read, find media/use different types of media to explain the themes that are shown in the text, or even a cooperative (group) performance piece .
These kinds of assignments are difficult to plagiarize and involve the type of thought and application of knowledge that far surpasses things like passage recognition tests and comparison essays. The necessary huge benefit of assignments like these is that it is open to interpretation, thus is an ethical pedagogical strategy that is inclusive to all students in the class.
But how do we apply this type of ethical assignment to something as massive and pedagogically ingrained as standardized testing? This will be a slow process that will require the involvement of many levels of government as well as individual universities and colleges. I think the first step would be to identify the individual skill sets that each of these professions require (lawyer, doctor, etc.). From there assignments that highlight these skills should be assigned, the caveat to these assignments would be that they need to be completed within a certain time frame (1 day, a few hours) and everyone would be working on this assignment within this "test" space. You go into this "test" in the morning and by the time the day is over it is completed, just like a GRE, GMAT, or LSAT. The difference here is that each student would be allowed to highlight their own individual strengths and ability to apply their knowledge and skills to it regardless of age, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender. Pipe dream? Possibly. Logistical nightmare? Possibly. Feasible solution? Definitely, it would only need the levels of government and post secondary institutions who maintain the outline for the pedagogical spaces our students inhabit to have an open mind and the desire to create more inclusive and less white heterosexual male standardized exams.
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