No reason for it to be impractical. I have my students bring their phones to the front desk. In a large class it becomes very difficult to see whether someone is trying to use their phone for something, particularly when a lot of phones and calculators look similar, or when students claim they are just using their icalculator. I had to make an exception for a student who needed an english-chinese translator.
A student cheating with a phone could bring two phones, one to place face down on the desk (or handed to the teacher) where it can be seen, and a hidden one to cheat with.
@Erin’s Dad: Our faculty handbook requires that we notify the honor council of any suspected misconduct. It is then out of our hands. If the honor council decides not to proceed with a hearing, or if the student is found not to have violated the honor code, then the faculty member may not punish the student. (We just had a situation in which a faculty member was unhappy that the honor council decided not to hold a hearing so he failed the student. The faculty member is in a bit of hot water.) The student who changed the e-mail dates failed the class and has a notation on his transcript.
Don’t forget texting answers or recording notes on the cell or writing inside clothes or notes in shoes. I see very little reason to include cell phones in school. There are people at ACT and SAT who provide security for tests and know all about cheating on tests. Maybe they have a guide.
@bopper: While some professor or other may have seen every form of cheating, very few individual professors have seen (or know about) every form. I may be late to the party, but many of my colleagues (and honor council staff) were surprised to hear about some of the new methods of cheating.
@ucbalumnus: Yes, we have talked about The Wire and burner phones. I know some faculty members who ask students to surrender phones when going to the restroom, but, as you suggest, that does not deter someone with a second phone or a small tablet. One faculty member I know does not permit students to go to the restroom during exams. That sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
@Proudpatriot: That is a good point. I had a case in which the student logged onto the course website during the exam. I was monitoring activity on the site, so I knew she was on. The only question was where she had hidden the phone. It turns out that she had placed her hoodie on her lap so I told her to move the hoodie, at which point the phone fell out. If we ask that all students place their phones on the desk, we still have to deal with those who claim to have forgotten their phones (and those who have two), but it may deter some.
[quote so what happened to this person? Did the original grade stand, was disciplinary action taken against the cheater? [quote]
@Nrdsb4: Yes, the original grade stood, and the student failed the course. The first hearing resulted in a recommendation of expulsion. At that point, the student appealed and threatened to sue over a procedural matter. A student is permitted to bring a “support person” to the hearing. When it came time for her hearing, the support person did not show up. (I am cynical enough to think that she orchestrated this to have grounds for an appeal.) A second hearing was held, and this time she got a one-semester suspension.
This isn’t a particularly creative one, but it’s difficult to impossible to catch (the student has to mess up to be caught) and it’s one of the most common ones I’ve seen: using exam/homework solutions from previous years when the professor doesn’t make it publicly available. Most professors don’t change up their classes between years in a very appreciable way.
Usually it’s best just to release old exams with solutions and have homework only count for something like 15-25% of the grade because of this. It’s a trick that most rather new professors are too often not well aware of.
I wonder if cheating has made it to the Apple Watch yet?
@ucbalumnus - The fact that you cannot stop all cheating doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Having the phones hidden during tests allows all forms of cheating where the phone can remain hidden.
There was a distraction three rows behind me when I took the SAT subject tests, as a proctor caught someone reaching in to his inside jacket pocket where he had a smart phone. It was disturbing to hear a “whispered” argument.
I was trying to focus on my own work but I am sure other kids were also annoyed by the distraction, which was followed by a few other kids “coughing” the word “cheater” as the proctors took his booklet away from him.
If the professor gave the exams back to the students, and those students shared them with the next year’s students, how is that cheating, really? Using old exams to study from is a time-honored method of studying for an exam.
^I agree, and my dad is a professor!
Because some people have them and some don’t. That’s a factor outside of knowledge of material that influences performance.
Also, it’s often explicitly forbidden on the syllabus.
Making the old exams publicly available equalizes access to them, as well as deterring instructors from reusing old exams the way the College Board does with SATs.
@NeoDymium: I agree completely. This is about getting an unfair advantage. Suppose that I am making up an exam. Absent-minded professor that I am, I put the penultimate version of the exam in an open recycling bin. A student walks by and sees the exam. What should the student do? In my mind, an honorable student will alert me to my blunder. Moreover, I believe that my school’s honor code would require that the student not take advantage of my blunder.
When I took my second PhD qualifier, I bought 3 books which had examples of previous exams used by, among others, the University I attended. Some students did not have these resources or were not aware of them. Did that make it cheating?
In general, I disagree that this sort of thing is cheating just because some students have them and others don’t. We’re not talking about students who hacked the professor’s computer and got the exam off in advance. These are materials which the professor gave back to previous students, thereby making them available to whomever. The professor no longer has control over who can see them and who can’t.
Disagree here also. Your expectation of “privacy” ends when you put something in the garbage. That’s what shredders are for.
I think some colleges would disagree with you on that.
Was it a qualifying exam that was publicly available? Or would you basically have to “know a guy” to get them? If it is the latter, then it is definitely cheating. AFAIK, previous qualifier exams are very often made public.
This is a matter of an advantage that people have not because they learned the material better, but because someone decided to give them insider information. One of the major expectations of all college students is that they do their own work and that they don’t use insider information. Using previous exams that were not made available to them, or made publicly available, is an unfair advantage that would certainly qualify as cheating.
It’s the equivalent of buying a solutions manual for homework that is graded on correctness, especially if you have to trick the publisher into thinking that you are an instructor (I have seen students pull this off too). If it’s not explicitly banned on the syllabus, you can expect that it is at least implicitly so and you’re going to be in hot water if you are caught doing it.
Published books purchased from Amazon. Still, not everyone taking the exam was aware that such materials existed.