How to Fight Cheating

David War­lick posted an arti­cle yes­ter­day about where the line is between cre­ativ­ity and cheating.

Over and over again I read about these kinds of issues, and it keeps remind­ing me that as an edu­ca­tor, I need to rethink the way I assess my stu­dents. Even in ele­men­tary school, this kind of prob­lem has been around for years—except in our case the “out­sourc­ing” often means that the par­ents did the work for the child.

They are often well-​​meaning, to a point, want­ing the best for their child—meaning of course the best grade. But rather than bemoan­ing the fact that our stu­dents (and par­ents) try to find the loop­holes in the assign­ment, we need to find dif­fer­ent ways of get­ting at what our kids know, under­stand, and are able to do.

I think it’s also impor­tant to be much more trans­par­ent about exactly what we’re look­ing for and why we want them to do what we’re ask­ing. Tell them up front that the goal is not a work­ing com­puter pro­gram, for exam­ple, but that it’s about the prob­lem solv­ing process they used to get there. So maybe we need to assess the student’s whole process—including notes and false starts and bug-​​filled code that won’t compile–and ask them to write about how they were able to get it working.

I also think it’s impor­tant to teach stu­dents how to use resources effec­tively. Instead of scold­ing some­one for going out and get­ting other peo­ple involved in a project, design assignments/​assessments that encour­age or even require it, and assess how well the stu­dent is able to inte­grate the help they get into the final product.