The honor council at my institution is putting together a guide for faculty to combat cheating. I imagine that that most faculty members are unaware of the creative ways that students cheat these days, but I am certain that CC readers have some good stories. Most of our cases are routine. About half involve plagiarism. Many others involve copying a classmate’s answers, and a few involve changing answers after a test or problem set has been graded. Cheat sheets of various forms (on hands, on arms, inside baseball caps, on or in labels on soft drink bottles, etc.) appear occasionally.
Recently, students have taken to downloading course materials to their phones or accessing material from the web during exams. I would be curious to hear of other methods that take advantage of new technology.
A colleague experienced a variant of the copying trick this semester. A student could not see the answer sheet of the student in front, so he held up his cell phone and took a picture.
My most intricate cases have involved students who alter answers. One semester, after midterm grades had been posted online, my TA got an e-mail from a student claiming that we had posted the wrong grade (53 vs. 93). The TA asked the student to bring us the exam. She stalled, but once it became clear that I would not change her grade without seeing the exam, she relented. I stared at her exam for a while. Eventually, it hit me that her exam had been hand-stapled, with the staple on a diagonal, whereas the department photocopier put staples parallel to the long edge of the paper. My guess is that she whited out all of the answers on her exam, and made a clean copy. She then wrote in answers (probably copied from a friend’s exam) and grading marks.
I had a few extra copies of the exam, and several students had not picked up their exams, so we had a good set against which to compare hers. She never admitted what she had done, even though there were several anomalies. (Her exam had a couple of distinctive marks on every page because of dirt on the photocopier that she used, the weight of the paper was different, etc.)
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