Nationwide 75 percent of students admit to cheating. Some online learning platforms make it more difficult—but are they missing the point?

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify BVSD’s intent when choosing their new online credit recovery platform. *

Studies show that between 75 to 80 percent of high school students admit to cheating in the last month. Some online learning platforms design their curriculum to prevent cheating including a credit recovery platform that Boulder Valley School District adopted this year.

According to the platform’s Academic Integrity policy and procedures, “Plagiarism, cheating, or other forms of academic dishonesty will not be tolerated and teachers will not accept work that is copied or plagiarized.”

According to BVSD spokesperson, Randy Barber, the district chose the software to make credit recovery easier for students.*

As schools adapt to a shifting information landscape and post-pandemic learning, there is debate over what new technology means for education. Do efforts to prevent students from cheating make sense? Is using technology to look up answers cheating? What is the purpose of learning to write an essay if AI can write it for you?

KGNU’s Alexis Kenyon spoke with Dr. Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit focused on student well-being, belonging, and engagement.

At Challenge Success, Pope surveyed students and found that while, yes, students are cheating at very high rates, efforts to block students from cheating only mask a much bigger problem.

 

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Denise Pope:

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    What does new tech mean for education? Alexis Kenyon

Full Interview transcript edited for web:

Alexis: I wanted to talk with you because of these new softwares. And with the new technology, in general, I feel like it’s changing the whole nature of why we’re educating people. You know, what are we trying to teach them? I’m curious what your thoughts are on that. These efforts to get ahead of people just Googling stuff or, in the case of AI, just putting it into an AI platform.

Dr. Pope: I think you’re absolutely right, Alexis. What is the purpose of education? What is it that we’re trying to get students to know and be able to do, particularly in the real world—not just in school? And in the real world, they will have access to technology.

So the schools that ban technology, that are sort of saying, you know, or putting up roadblocks for students to discover information—it doesn’t seem like it’s going in the right direction.

That said, you have to know enough information as a student and be able to really apply critical thinking skills to the search content in order to know if you’re using it correctly or not, or if it’s giving you the right or wrong answer.

So, rather than block the usage or make it harder for kids to find the answers, I want the opposite, which is to let them find the answers but then walk them through what they would need to know to be able to say, “Is this correct?” or “Is this actually something that I can trust? Can we talk about sources, and what makes a good source? And how do you know when something is true or not?”

Artificial intelligence vs an artificial system of success?

Alexis: I mean, I use AI every day. I’m really hesitant to show interns the way I use it because it’s a first draft, and I’m able to identify all of the reasons why I need to change it and/or the things that seem suspicious—you know, the stats that seem suspicious, the information that seems suspicious. But there are so many different things that go into me being able to identify that, and I don’t trust them enough to be able to identify that because I don’t know if I would have been able to identify it at their age.

Dr. Pope: So, one of the things that I would say to you—and I would say this to an English teacher teaching this as well, right?—is, “Let’s, together, put this into ChatGPT. Let’s, together,—I’m going to think out loud and show you what my brain does when I’m reading that first draft put out by ChatGPT. Go along, go along. ‘Oh, wait a minute, something’s going off in my head’—that looks suspicious. How do I then verify this? What are the steps I take to verify this?”

So you’re actually modeling, and you’re working with them, but you’re doing it with them as opposed to saying, “You’re not ready for this, so we’re going to actually not allow you to use this tool until you’re ready.”

They’re not going to learn until they’re doing it and using it and watching, and the modeling that the experts are going to do shows them.

 Is getting help, cheating?

Alexis: Yeah. One thing that I found really interesting is this forces us to look at our concept of what is cheating. What is cheating, and why is it bad? Is cheating having a tutor? Is cheating having access to information? What do you think cheating is? How do you think it’s been defined, and has that changed at all?

Dr. Pope: Yeah, it’s a great question. So we, for decades at Challenge Success, have been looking at, among other things, students’ behavior that many people would call cheating. And the reason I say that “many people would call cheating” is because some of the things kids are doing, they actually don’t consider it cheating.

Copying someone’s homework when you haven’t had time to do it—they kind of know in the back of their head that’s cheating, but they also see that as a survival skill, and that there’s so much work to do and not enough time to do it, so let’s just divvy it up.Or asking a parent for help on something, and then, you know, turning it in as if it was your own work. When you have, like, the parent edit your paper, it’s a kind of a fine line, right?

A lot of times the teachers don’t make it really clear. Remember, when you’re in the classroom, you’re supposed to be cooperatively learning and working in small groups. It’s only all of a sudden outside the classroom when you’re doing your homework that you’re not supposed to be doing that. It doesn’t make any sense, right?

So really having educators look at policies and ask, we have a litmus test that we asked the educators, “Is this activity harmful for student learning or helpful for student learning?”

And we actually give them in workshops that we do five, six, seven different scenarios and have them place it on the harmful or helpful line. And the answer is usually, “It depends what it is you’re trying to teach.”

In the real world, it is almost never that you will be told you can’t use your computer or any of your colleagues around you to do a task. That’s an artificial thing that we set up in schools only, right?

And so we’ve set up this sort of artificial system in schools, and call things cheating in some places and not cheating in other places. And it can be not just confusing but also really detrimental to learning.

So when we have, for decades, asked students, “Have they done any of the following behaviors?”—we actually don’t, on our survey, say “cheating.” We say, “Have you done any of the following behaviors in the past month?”

They will be honest, and they’ll say, “Yes, I have.” And if you ask them why, often it’s because they’re either overloaded, literally don’t have enough time to do it, or they don’t understand how to do it and it’s high stakes, right? A grade, a test—this is a high-stakes kind of assessment. Or, they think it’s meaningless busy work.

And you kind of can’t fault them for doing these things, especially when the system is set up to be so artificial, and they know in real life they can look it up.

They can ask questions. They can check sources. They can talk to their friends. I mean, it’s just—we’ve set up this artificial system, and it’s to the detriment of all.

When do kids not cheat?

Alexis: Yeah. I mean, I agree with you that believing you know what is right and wrong when it comes to cheating or not cheating feels like an artificial system. What are the intentions behind it, and why is it turning out to be problematic?

Dr. Pope: So, another question that we ask in our workshops is: “When do kids not cheat?” It turns out when they’re putting on a play. When they are in the middle of a football game. When they are prepping for a Model United Nations debate, right?

It happens in those times where kids are truly engaged and excited about what they’re learning, that they don’t want to cheat. And because those things are set up to not be done in silos alone without the resources that you normally use to learn things. So, when you’re in Robotics Club, it’s all hands on deck, and you want everybody to help you figure out how to make the robot do what it does. And so you’re all sharing sources left and right, and using the internet, and the mentor people from the community—anything it takes to win that robotics competition, right?

And no one wants to cheat, because what’s the purpose of that? Then it’s not a real win, right?

I don’t even know how you cheat when you put on a play.

So, we need to design more opportunities for students that are authentic, real-world opportunities like what people do in the real world. When you’re engaged and excited about what you’re doing, and when you know that you’re kind of all in this together and you can use the resources, the temptation to cheat goes way down.

Binaries of success and deciding what to teach

Alexis: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the play is a better example than the robotics example because in the play it’s not about winning or not winning. It’s not about getting an A or an F. It’s not a binary, which makes it so that it wouldn’t be about that because it’s all about your performance.

Dr. Pope: Here’s another example we use all the time. So, project-based learning and problem-based learning have been around forever, and it’s something that we promote at Challenge Success. And it’s hard to get teachers to think about how to do this. And it can be little projects or problems that are sort of real life.

Like, instead of doing a chemistry experiment that’s fake, you actually take water from the water fountain from the school and run the water analysis on that water and write up a report to the city engineers about why we need a better filtration system. You could cut corners on that, but it’s for your own good. It’s for the better filtration system for the school, right? So, you have this real motivation.

We’ve had a school where the kids did a ton of physics and math and construction building skateboard ramps for their own use, right? There’s motivation built in. There’s teamwork built in. There’s a ton of STEM content built into that, right? There’s no need for them to cheat. It just doesn’t happen.

What is the purpose of school?

Alexis: Yeah. I mean, okay, so this is another big question I think about a lot. What is school for if we have access to all the information we can ever want or dream of? What are kids supposed to be learning in school? And does it make sense to have the same requirements we’ve always had? Because it feels really extreme to just abandon, you know, having to read Edgar Allan Poe in ninth grade or drop the curriculum.

Dr. Pope: So, okay, I love this question. One thing that I teach at Stanford is called curriculum construction. And we talk about exactly this—what is the purpose of school?

Out of all the things to teach, you can’t possibly teach it all. How do you decide what to spend these precious few hours that you get with the kids to teach?

So, that’s one piece of the question that you asked, but another piece is with the advent of AI—I just had a panel of students that I was at a conference with, and they were talking about AI. And one person said, “Well, I don’t understand why we need to learn how to write, because we’ll just have AI write for us.” And another student—these are middle school students—said, “Well, yeah, and you know what? I can do so many things, like what is the purpose of school?” And I was raising my hands in excitement because these are the conversations I want kids to have, and I want educators to have, right?

Given the advent of new technology, what should change? And what is the purpose of school? What do we really need to learn? And particularly with AI, what you really need to double down on is critical thinking and understanding sources and understanding what makes a source good or not.

And think about it—if, in our current political state, everybody had that knowledge, we would maybe not be in the mess that we’re in.

So, I think getting kids to think about what do we really need to know versus what can we just look up and not have to memorize?

I mean, I still have history teachers out there who make kids memorize dates and places and whatnot. And it’s much more important to understand chronology and what came first and what came after than to memorize the exact date of something.

I have chemistry teachers who still make kids memorize the periodic table. I have math teachers who still swear you should understand calculus to get into college. And when are we really using calculus in our lives?

And that taking a statistics class doesn’t look as good as taking an AP calculus class, whereas we use statistics all the time.

So the system is really backwards. And I love the fact that kids, hopefully, and teachers will start talking more about this because of the invention of this technology that can do a lot more than we’ve ever had the possibility of doing before.

Isn’t the stuff we learn in school valuable because it challenges our brain?

Alexis: Isn’t there some value, though, to—you know, I remember I was in AP calculus. It was hard for me. But I think that exercise was really good for my brain, you know? It helped me work on things that I’m not great at naturally. It’s like your body—exercise—that process of exercising your brain and challenging it. How would you reconcile this?

Dr. Pope: I want people to think really hard about what kids need to know in the year 2024 and beyond.

And I am not against exercising the brain. What I worry about is how you decide what to exercise that brain about.

How did we come up with AP calculus as the right exercise for the brain to solve some hard things versus statistics, which can also be very hard?

If I had a magic wand and you really think about what kids need to know and what is really important to learn—the way we’ve been teaching math has really not been all that great.

And I, you know, a friend of mine is writing a math textbook where he’s talking about how we need to know much better about things like estimation. We need to understand statistics much better. And here’s why: because every day we’re using this stuff. Calculus is a great exercise for your brain, but it’s not useful.

I would rather have us exercise our brains about really important, useful things and really think about how we teach math.

You know, if someone had told me—because I was an English major—that math is a language, if someone had just even literally said that, instead of just giving me bunches of problems to solve that I would just try to use an algorithm and not really understand, I would have tried harder.

And if someone had just said to me, “No, math is a language to describe the world,” and really showed me what that means, and helped me understand patterns and think about patterns and see how patterns relate to critical thinking, I maybe wouldn’t have been an English major. I mean, I love English, but I might not have been so turned off by math.

Alexis: That’s a really good point. I feel like especially after I got out of college, being like, “Why didn’t someone just explain this more clearly to me before?”

Dr. Pope: I think we lose sight. It’s the forest and the trees, right? And then you’re also, as a teacher, you’re trying to fly the plane while you’re building it. It’s really hard. Things change.

History gets longer every day, right? And textbooks and things like that take years to catch up.

Historians do not open a textbook, read a paragraph, and answer questions about it. Historians look at real documents, right? And decide whose opinion should get weight here. What actually happened? How do we figure that out? We’re just not teaching in ways that are super engaging.

But beyond that, we’re teaching in ways that may not be providing the real skills in the disciplines that disciplinary experts have because we are short-cutting and doing these things like, “Just open up the textbook and answer these questions.”

As opposed to, “Here’s a page from a diary from the battle of XYZ. Let’s look at that and think about how that plays out now with Ukraine and Russia, which you get alerts on your phone about every day.” And these kids can’t even locate it on a map.

Alexis: It feels like current events are more accessible than ever, that more of our curriculum needs to be tied to these events.

Dr. Pope: With the understanding from the disciplines to look at those current events, absolutely.

Are students really using AI to cheat?

Alexis: Before I let you go, I was wondering if you could just go through what you have found about cheating. You had some interesting differentiations that you spelled out where you looked at pre-AI and post-AI, and how students felt about cheating and whether they did cheat or not. And I was just wondering if you could go through that.

Dr. Pope: Sure. So, when ChatGPT came out in fall 2022, we were already set up and had been looking at particular schools and cheating rates in schools for years.

And so we had this really great opportunity to do almost a pre-post where we had the same schools take the survey before ChatGPT and then after. And we’re actually still using that data and analyzing that data.

It turns out cheating rates were high before ChatGPT—not just in our own survey, but national surveys. They all hover around 75 to 80%.

So yeah, two-thirds or more of kids—sorry, 75 is… Look at me with statistics, right? Three-quarters, three-quarters—okay, three-quarters of kids or more were cheating even before ChatGPT came into town, right?

We asked questions like, “How often did you cheat with someone’s knowledge on a test or without someone’s knowledge, copying homework, staying home on the day of a test to get more time to study or hear what might be on it, using an illegal cheat sheet, or some kind of technology that wasn’t allowed?” We had all those questions.

Then ChatGPT came into play, and we resurveyed. And it turns out those numbers did not really change in terms of it still being about 75 to 80% of kids admitting to cheating in the past month.What we started to see is the ways in which they’re cheating might change a little bit—even that, not as much to show the fear of AI.

Everyone was worried about, like ChatGPT was going to, you know, unleash the kraken, and it was going to be like cheating was going to go through the roof.

Well, cheating was pretty much through the roof before then. So it tells you that what we were doing before wasn’t right either, and this is not the thing that’s causing cheating. The thing that’s causing cheating are all those things that I said at the beginning: overload, exhaustion, busy work, perception of busy work, lack of understanding how to do it, pressure to get grades and test scores, and high stakes situations, right?

So, we’re just thinking about education completely wrong. We’ve got to get out of the ranking and sorting game and really into teaching what needs to be taught for kids in a world that makes it much more authentic, where they wouldn’t even want to cheat.

How do schools get attendance rates back up?

Alexis: So this brings up one more question I have for you. So, my partner works in the school system, and he and his coworkers are, you know, dealing with all kinds of issues that we’ve been talking about when it comes to technology and limiting it or not limiting it. And I’m always suggesting, you know, like you should just ask your kids what they think.

Dr. Pope: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Alexis: You know, he actually works with a population that is struggling academically—you know, they’ve dropped out or been kicked out of other high schools. And one of the biggest hurdles in their program is just trying to get kids to come to school, you know, attendance. And I can understand why.

Dr. Pope: Yep. Yep. 100%.

Alexis: And if you look at the stats, it’s not just his group, you know? Overall, nationwide, attendance rates for schools are way down since the pandemic. And in a lot of ways, I think it’s because of this question, you know, of, “With this new technology, what is the point of school?” You know, like, what are we supposed to be learning? And how is any of this relevant? You work with a lot of students, hearing their perspectives, and I’m curious—how do you reconcile this from what you hear from students?

Dr. Pope: So this is actually what the nonprofit Challenge Success does. We work with schools, mostly at the school level, sometimes at the district level, to center the student voice as they think about improving policies and practices for kids. And by centering the student voice, literally what we have them do is ask the kids.

So, we have surveys, obviously, where kids are giving us information, but we also have focus groups. We have “I wish” campaigns, like “I wish my teachers knew,” or “I wish my parents knew.” We ask kids, “You’re the ones going through this—what can we do to make it better?” Same thing with the kids who aren’t coming. “What would make you come? What are the things that you liked about school before you left? What are the things you didn’t like?”

It is crazy to me that we do not ask the people going through the experience themselves about what their experiences are, let alone how we can make it better or fix it. We have teachers and administrators shadow students. In fact, you should tell your partner to do this—shadow a student for an entire school day, from bus stop to bus stop. It’s eye-opening.

Alexis: Hmm.

Dr. Pope: Teachers are like, “I didn’t even make it through fourth period. I was hungry. I was sitting all the time. It was totally passive. No adult spoke to the kid I was shadowing for the entire day,” right? Like, it’s just crazy, the things that you learn. And once you are really aware of the student experience, and you bring them into these discussions of how to make it better and show them that they’re valued and respected and that they have agency, it’s kind of half the battle.

Alexis: Right.

Dr. Pope: I mean, you still have to make the changes, right? We still live in a system that requires us to do ridiculous things like have grades and rank and sort people. But for these kids, for these kids for whom the regular system didn’t work at all, there should be much more flexibility. You know, you can go to a community college without a high school degree, by the way. We just got to get these kids back to being excited about learning and turn on the curiosity—not give them B’s and C’s and D’s and all that.

 Helping struggling students

Alexis: Okay, one more question. I have a—I’m not going to say who he is, but I know a kid. I am close with his mom. And his grandparents are very worried. They’re worried that he doesn’t know how to read very well. He’s just starting high school, and they’re worried that his reading level is, you know, second-grade level, and that he doesn’t know how to do basic math. And they believe it’s because he went to an alternative middle school where they didn’t have grades. And so they think that’s why, at this public school, he’s so far behind.

At the same time, he’s a smart kid. I know he’s a smart kid. He’s interested in all kinds of things. He’s a nerd about a lot of things. And I’m curious—what advice would you have for him, his parents, his grandparents? How would you suggest helping a kid like that to become more engaged in school, which right now he is 100% not?

Dr. Pope: Well, I mean, honestly, progressive schools, in many, many places, are the answer because they are the ones who tend to do more project-based learning. They tend to be much more child-centered, really focused on getting the kids to learn. They don’t have grades in elementary school, which is something that I strongly believe in. And they don’t have things like tests and quizzes and things. I mean, like, it’s crazy, right?

Alexis: Yeah.

Dr. Pope: That’s not how people learn. So, the fact that he’s curious and he’s excited about learning certain things and he’s super smart—I mean, that could be a real testament to that progressive school. Now, obviously, kids need to know how to read. And I question whether it’s really true that he doesn’t read at the right level. And if it is true, what we do sometimes see in independent schools is maybe not enough early detection of some reading disorders. Whereas in the public schools, you tend to have more of that.

But the anecdote that I would say to a kid who’s not interested in learning is usually a more progressive school. And we’ve got really good data that shows that, and they end up—like, kids who go to—I’ll just give you an example. Kids who go to play-based preschools outscore their peers in elementary school, you know, consistently.

So, schools that focus on project-based learning, where kids are excited and see the meaning and purpose of what they’re learning and don’t have traditional forms of assessment that tend to kind of suck the life out of kids—you do see curiosity go up, and you do see more success in school.

So, I think that there’s a real concern, like, you don’t want your kid to fall behind. But behind who? Like, that’s the thing that I think is so crazy.

In the Netherlands or in Finland, in Waldorf schools across the globe, you learn to read when you’re ready to learn to read. And they don’t push you to read before you’re seven if you don’t want to. Who invented this race of who’s behind and who’s ahead?

Alexis: Yeah, totally. Absolutely. People’s brains mature at different rates, too.

Dr. Pope: Right. And it’s not too late to reinvent yourself at all times. I mean, I’ve got kids who failed out of high school and failed out of community college, and one of them is getting a PhD in chemistry at Stanford. I mean, you know, right? Just, you know, not everyone—many people will find their way when we make the path available.

Alexis: Hmm. That’s very wise. And also very zen.

Dr. Pope: It is. It is zen. It is zen.

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Alexis Kenyon

Alexis Kenyon is a radio reporter with more than 15 years of experience creating compelling, sound-rich radio stories for news outlets across the country.
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