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Texas A&M investigating "large scale" cheating case as universities see more academic misconduct in era of online classes
An already unusual fall semester was wrapping up when Texas A&M University officials sent out an email in early December to the hundreds of students in an online finance class that set off a panic.

Faculty reported concerns of cheating "on a very large scale" to the Aggie Honor System Office, after they noticed some students in the class answered online test questions too quickly. Later, faculty discovered entire exams posted on a "homework help" website that has become synonymous with cheating.

University officials told guilty students to self-report by 5 p.m. on Dec. 8. If they didn't come forward but were found in violation of the academic honor code, they could face suspension or expulsion.

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Like Tom Brady cheat or Houston Astros cheat?

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At Texas A&M, academic dishonesty reports have increased by as much as 20% from last fall, Powers said. The University of North Texas saw a 20% increase, and Texas State University saw reports of cheating increase by one-third over the previous fall. The University of Houston saw reports more than double from last fall to 456 cases as of Dec. 14.

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"If you are not cheating, then you are not trying."
-Jim Rome

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"Instead of taking an assessment in class where the teacher is watching you, you are at your computer not being watched," said Rachel Davenport, a lecturer at Texas State and vice chair of the Honor Code Council, which reviews academic misconduct cases. "The opportunity has just increased dramatically to use online sources."

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Like duh!
Every school from elementary to college is having this very problem this year.
But hey, work from home, COVID is bad yall, we are all in this together.

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In the case at Texas A&M, students interviewed by The Texas Tribune said they used a website called Chegg to access answers on assignments. The website started years ago for textbook rentals and has since expanded to include online tutoring. For a monthly fee, students can submit questions that someone around the world will answer within a few hours. While critics said the site can be helpful for students seeking tutoring, they argue many students are misusing it to pass off another person's work as their own.

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Welcome to the free market.

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According to Powers' email, Texas A&M's online learning platform, Canvas, tracks how long test questions are displayed on a student's screen. He said there are "hundreds of examples" where students answered a question faster than it would take to read it.

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If they are that dumb, then....

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In a statement, a Chegg spokesperson said they support academic integrity.
"At Chegg, we believe that expertise and experience is important to actually retain knowledge and apply it in whatever field students seek upon graduation, so we ask students to stick to our Honor Code," said spokesperson Devonya Batiste.

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Yep.
Bought that sports car, won't go fast. LOL

I wonder if A&M has better luck proving cheating than Trump did. Of course, A&M won't have to relay on the courts; they can just make their own decision.

Not surprising considering the progressive turn we've seen the school and student body take.

Do the professors generate the questions for the exams? Or is it generated by the testing website?

If the first case, IMO, you have two realistic options here.

You could spend thousands of dollars at the university level investigating these every year.

Or you can ask the teachers to stop reusing the same questions that are available online.

Champ Bailey said:

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Do the professors generate the questions for the exams? Or is it generated by the testing website?

If the first case, IMO, you have two realistic options here.

You could spend thousands of dollars at the university level investigating these every year.

Or you can ask the teachers to stop reusing the same questions that are available online.

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Wait.. anthropology professors actually have to give a little effort?

Not likely..

Better yet, do as many classes in person as possible and quit hiding under the bed from the China virus.

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Wait.. anthropology professors actually have to give a little effort?

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Only on issues related to chalk.

Oh snap!

How far back are they investigating....that dam polisci 205 class!

But it wasn't the real exam, just a version of it!

This is something that is also due to the top 10% rule. Go talk to rigorous high schools and the stories they can tell of cheating is absurd and it's not the kids who are mediocre students. It's the top 10% that have Google Docs full of questions from tests as they take them. You have to be invited to these groups and then contribute or you are booted.

Fake a hate crime, graduate and receive praise.

Cheat on an online history test, scum of the earth.

What did they expect would happen when they went online for even BS courses students don't care about?

This is yet another reason why college as we know it is outdated and massively needs to be updated. Cheating is far too easy nowadays and the testing situation does not reflect the reality of what they have access to anymore.

This post has been disputed.

Don't need to vote in person to prevent fraud, shouldn't need to take exams in person to prevent fraud either. Nothing to see here, Russian disinformation

Tell ya what Admins...you can go after these Honor cases immediately after the Honor case of Isaih Martin's fake race notes on his car.

This is why online colleges/universities are typically seeing as joke degrees and scams.

Part of an A&M degree's worth is your experience in class and on campus

The Corps been doing this since forever.

Does Mr Bill count as cheating?

TomFoolery said:

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This is why online colleges/universities are typically seeing as joke degrees and scams.

Part of an A&M degree's worth is your experience in class and on campus

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Almost every university, even some of the Ivy's, offer online degrees now. It's the way of the future.

University is taking the focus off of Sully. Free Sully!

Don't mean to derail this thread, but the University is cheating the vast majority of us that support Sully.

Reminds me of the semester I took engineering ethics.
Was the same semester all but 3 of the Mays Business school seniors were caught cheating in their ethics class.

Think about that...
the entire class (excluding about 3 students) were caught cheating in their ethics class and had to repeat the class.

So our students are finally trying to compete with students from Asian nations who have perfected this type of thing.

No duh people are cheating. People cheat in online classes all the time, wake up A&M

They won't do ***** There are plenty of options to solve this, but even when I was there, massive cheating wasn't punished because it could reduce graduation rates. Even a ****ing ETHICS course had a cheating scandal and only a couple people had any punishment. No F*s and no failing the class. Business Student Council had a bank of stolen exams. One professor even said "if you have a copy of an old exam, it was stolen," but those BSC kids never admitted they had copies of exams. One person walked out and admitted it to him, but no one was punished.

I even proctored an exam once where I caught a guy taking the exam for someone else. His ID didn't look a thing like him and his signature didn't match. The real guy was allowed to q-drop the class without penalty.

A&M's acceptance of honor code violations has increased since the mid-00s. We are a full fledged diploma mill now.

"According to Powers' email, Texas A&M's online learning platform, Canvas, tracks how long test questions are displayed on a student's screen. He said there are "hundreds of examples" where students answered a question faster than it would take to read it."


That's just a statistical aberration.

There is no evidence of cheating /libs

I thought we officially through out that whole honor code thing last summer, with that hoax thing. Was it only lying that is now OK? Hard to keep up with these things when there's no consistency...

Leather Tuscadero said:

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TomFoolery said:

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This is why online colleges/universities are typically seeing as joke degrees and scams.

Part of an A&M degree's worth is your experience in class and on campus

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Almost every university, even some of the Ivy's, offer online degrees now. It's the way of the future.

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Agreed but unless there are major overhauls in the system I would venture a guess that someone would take a student that attended an institution physically over a student that attended that same institution virtually.

And there's a huge difference in a a degree program designed to be taken online, and a degree program designed to be taken in person that's adapted to online learning last second.

InfantryAg said:

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I thought we officially through out that whole honor code thing last summer, with that hoax thing. Was it only lying that is now OK? Hard to keep up with these things when there's no consistency...

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No consistency? Are you talking about honor code or forum moder..... oh nevermind.

is there a $1200 reward available for information leading to the suspects?

Scruffy said:

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Reminds me of the semester I took engineering ethics.
Was the same semester all but 3 of the Mays Business school seniors were caught cheating in their ethics class.

Think about that...
the entire class (excluding about 3 students) were caught cheating in their ethics class and had to repeat the class.

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I had a friend who was Industrial Distribution major back in the late-1980s. She took a class in the FINC department as part of her degree. One assignment dealt with using a spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day) to run some calcs. The prof had personalized the spreadsheet file on each floppy disk that was handed out to students. I think he put a unique label in an obscure cell in each spreadsheet. When the students turned their disks back in, he quickly figured out several of them had just turned in copies of the same spreadsheet.

Sounds like not much has changed in the FINC department in 30 years.

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According to Powers' email, Texas A&M's online learning platform, Canvas, tracks how long test questions are displayed on a student's screen. He said there are "hundreds of examples" where students answered a question faster than it would take to read it.

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Not fully reading the question was one of my specialties in school. I knew immediately what the prof was asking upon reading the first few words of multiple choice test. Too bad I was often more wrong than right but boy was I fast at getting the answer!

MTTANK said:

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Don't need to vote in person to prevent fraud, shouldn't need to take exams in person to prevent fraud either. Nothing to see here, Russian disinformation

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I made this exact point when libs asked what was so bad about mail in voting. It's the perfect analogy.

Chegg has really thrown a wrench in the traditional STEM class structure of lecture-homeworks-exam-repeat. The website allows you to post a unique problem, but it also has full solution manuals for textbooks. So if your professor doesn't feel like writing unique individual homework problems and just assigns problems out of the textbook then the Chegg using students get a 100 on their homework for the semester. The professors know this and I had multiple in undergrad say "if you use Chegg to help on the homework when you get stuck on a problem that's fine, but if you're just copying it down you're not gonna learn the material and you're gonna bomb the exams". Many of them made homework only worth around 10% of the overall course grade to account for this. This was the pretty clear as day next step when exams were moved online as well.

Fake news...I see no widespread proof of cheating.