A Professor Wants to Fail Students for Sharing Information in an Online Chat. But Has Tech Changed What Qualifies as Cheating?

John Kappelman alerted about half of the students in his online anthropology course to their “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” last Thursday. The reason: More than 70 had participated in a class GroupMe, in which information regarding lab and exam answers had been shared.

“My disappointment arises from the fact that the rules for the class are clear,” wrote Kappelman, a professor in the departments of anthropology and geological sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. “Students are not permitted to ask about, discuss, or share information related to exams and labs.”

Because every student had “signed and submitted a course honesty agreement,” according to Kappelman’s email, he recommended that every student in the GroupMe chat receive an F, and he referred the case to the dean of students.

“Faculty have the ability to set expectations for their classes, including what, if any, collaboration or information-sharing is acceptable,” Sara Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the dean wrote in a statement. Kappelman declined to comment as the investigation continues.

The decision to extend punishment to every student in the chat raises questions of fairness for those who had it muted or never checked it.

More broadly, the scandal highlights the difficult issue of expanding technology in the classroom, students in the Google generation who view the free exchange of information without citation as not problematic, and faculty members who are wary of the use — and perceived abuse — of new digital tools.

GroupMe, a messaging app that allows users to create group messages of as many as 500 members, has become a popular way for students to connect with new classmates or with collaborators on group projects. The app allows users to add people to a group without sharing the added people’s contact details with the group as a whole — a welcome perk for students who don’t want their phone numbers to become public.

Some Reddit users who responded to a tweet with screenshots of Kappelman’s email described how they had used GroupMe in their classes. “I’m in multiple class groupme’s and we only use them to ask questions and coordinate study groups,” one user wrote. “I also have them all on mute. I’d be pissed if I was accused of cheating for being in a groupme I never participated in.”

This is not the first time students have gotten into trouble for using the messaging app. Ohio State University and Louisiana State University disciplined students who participated in GroupMe chats in which class information was impermissibly shared. In 2017, Ohio State found 83 students in violation of “unauthorized collaboration” via GroupMe.

“Students are welcome to use social media tools like GroupMe to communicate with classmates but must remember that the rules regarding academic misconduct are the same for online and in-person interactions,” wrote Ben Johnson, a spokesperson for Ohio State, in response to questions about how the university has changed since the 2017 incident. The university makes Proctorio, “learning integrity” software meant to spot cheating and otherwise suspicious behavior during exams or assignments, available to its professors.

Eric Stoller, a former consultant to universities on social-media use who is now vice president for digital strategy at GeckoEngage, a digital-services provider for colleges, said that while GroupMe offers students an efficient, semi-private way to connect, they should be wary of its potential to be misused. “I don’t think students can be passive when they join these groups. They have to be cognizant of the fact that when bad things start to happen, it’s on them to alert the dean of students [or] their instructor.”

Students’ misuse of technological tools stems in part from a lack of clarity about changing norms after they leave high school, Stoller said. While many students are accustomed to a “turn everything off” policy in high school, colleges tend to have looser rules. In many classes, students are allowed to have their laptops and phones out, he noted, giving them access to many platforms.

Besides GroupMe, students can use problem-solving resources like Chegg and Wolfram Alpha, and databases like Quizlet, which often host a class’s previous tests and assignment answers. Those digital platforms are not malicious on their own, but they do allow students intent on gaming the system to “enhance and amplify” their ability to expose vulnerabilities, Stoller said.

David Rettinger, president of the International Center for Academic Integrity, said advances in digital technology shouldn’t alter a shared understanding of the principles of academic integrity; the changes just make it harder to figure out which principles apply. He compared the GroupMe matter at Texas to two students in a room cheating and a third one overhearing them.

“Most institutions would not consider that to be an academic integrity violation,” Rettinger said. “If we took this offline and into an in-person situation, I would say very few schools would call the analogous situation a policy violation.”

‘How Do You Know?’

Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology at Ohio State University who studies academic cheating, doesn’t agree that the Texas situation is clear-cut. “It’s like when you’re on a jury and the judge says, ‘Strike that from the record — you didn’t hear it,’” he said. “Well, how do you know that they didn’t hear it?”

A better way to counter digital-assisted cheating in classes, Anderman said, is for faculty members to tailor their assignments and exams differently each semester.

In his courses, he has stopped assigning research papers and instead asks students to complete papers based on an original question that’s relevant to that class at that specific time. That way he knows his students won’t be able to buy a response from an online paper mill. It requires more work on the professor’s part, but Anderman, as a researcher of academic cheating, said he prefers to prevent improprieties.

Stoller recommended that universities and faculty members work to close the gap between students’ use of digital tools in their academic work and in their everyday lives. Digital-native students will seek any available resource to enhance their learning. That openness can lead to a disconnect between the expectations of students and their instructors.

For Rettinger, that tension arises from higher education’s traditional emphasis on developing an individual’s skills and knowledge, on the one hand, and the increasingly collaborative, shared nature of the workplace and the wider world on the other.

“We have to adapt what we consider to be high-integrity work to match our cultural shifts,” he said. “It’s really important for us as educators to help students understand that not only do you need collaborative skills to work in a collaborative world, but you need individual skills to bring to that collaboration.”

As technology evolves, faculty members will need to adapt their expectations of how students work and how the tools they have available to them will shape that work, Rettinger said. Higher education has weathered technological changes before, incorporating advances into its process. The key for higher education to keep up with innovation, he said, is “to scaffold the learning onto the technology that’s available rather than to fight against the technology.”

Wesley Jenkins is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @_wesjenks, or email him at wjenkins@chronicle.com.