+ Cheating Their Way to the Top

It’s 7:50AM and a student named James walks into a lecture hall followed by several hundred others to find a seat before his first chemistry exam of his freshman year of college. He finds an open seat about three rows from the back and kicks back as he opens the bottle of Coca-Cola he brought with him – not for the caffeine mind you, but for the equations he has copied on the inside of the label.

In today’s educational environment, academic dishonesty is a major concern of teachers, professors and school administration alike. Some feel that there should be more proctors when tests are given and others feel that integrity contracts for students, like this one from the University of Kentucky Chemistry Department should be put into effect. Whatever the solution to academic dishonesty might be, I thought that the people in this post over at Weblogg-ed and Tony Vencent of the learninginhand blog had some interesting things to say on the topic. One of the ideas I personally liked was the possibility of a professor giving an assessment project that dealt with application of concepts versus the standard multiple choice tests that are common in classes across the board. Although the grading/creation process might not be as easy for an educator, and no clear cut way of grading is possible with these sorts of projects, it definitely cuts the cheating element in any class to a minimum. In a world where creative students will always find some way to circumvent the system, I think this could be something for every educator to at least consider or partially implement if not fully adopted.