How to Proctor From a Distance

Experts say professors need savvy to prevent cheating in on-line courses

Technology is offering students new and easier ways to cheat, especially in on-line courses. But the same technology is also giving professors easier ways to catch cheaters.

Back when distance education was conducted through correspondence, it

wasn’t easy to tell who had really written a paper or filled out a test form. Now that courses are on line, professors are using technology to identify students more reliably, although still not beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Colleges venturing into distance education face a great deal of apprehension among faculty members about the potential for cheating. Dees Stallings, director of academic programs at VCampus, a company that helps colleges set up on-line courses, says one of the first things he has to do when working with new professors is allay their fears of on-line cheating.

“Everybody’s always concerned when they first get started,” he says. “They’ll ask things like, ‘How do I know it’s not Grover who’s taking the course?’”

Measuring the extent of on-line cheating is difficult. No national data exist. Several colleges with extensive distance-education programs -- including Michigan State University, Ohio University, the University of Texas System, Park College, and Pueblo Community College -- report that they have had few, if any cases, where disciplinary action has been taken for cheating in on-line classes. More cheating is reported in traditional classrooms, officials say.

The potential for cheating in distance-education courses is about equal to that in traditional courses, Mr. Stallings says, but professors need a new savvy to detect and prevent cheating on line. Besides worrying about whether students are really who they say they are, faculty members are anxious about on-line term-paper mills and other digital aids to cheating.

Jeanne M. Wilson, president of the Center for Academic Integrity, which is affiliated with Duke University, says the growth of on-line education makes it harder to be sure that the student who gets the credit is the one who did the work. “If you don’t ever meet the student, it’s harder to evaluate the student’s work.”

Even students who sit in a lecture hall with hundreds of others can feel isolated and anonymous, she points out, adding that such anonymity prevents the creation of a bond between student and professor that might discourage cheating. On-line education only worsens that sense of isolation and anonymity, she says.

“It’s kind of like the difference between living in a big city and living in a small town where everyone knows your folks and would tell them if you did something wrong,” Ms. Wilson says.

To the contrary, argues Mr. Stallings, one of the benefits of an on-line class is that almost all communication is in writing. “That really brings the academic rigor up. This allows an instructor to get to know a student better than in an on-site class.”

Some tactics that professors can use to prevent cheating include making an unexpected phone call to discuss a point further or to ask the student how he or she found some piece of information. In addition, Mr. Stallings says, a $20 camera can sit atop a student’s computer and send the professor a stream of images of the student taking a test or discussing issues.

Still, he acknowledges, nothing is foolproof: “My girlfriend can still hold up a cue card off camera.”

The best way to prevent cheating during tests is to have proctors keep an eye on students, Mr. Stallings says. If the students are too far away to come to the main campus for exams, the professor can call a local college or high school and ask someone to serve as proctor. In extraordinary cases, an Army officer could supervise a test for a subordinate, or a priest could keep watch while a parishioner takes a midterm exam.

It’s up to the professor to be realistic about students’ behavior and not get mired in denial when evidence suggests that a student might be cheating, Mr. Stallings adds. “A professor can say, ‘Darn, I taught that guy to write in two weeks!’”

Darcy W. Hardy, director of the University of Texas’s distance-education component, called Telecampus, says the key to catching cheaters is to know the students in the class. But instructors can’t do that if a course has a large enrollment, whether in the classroom or on line.

“I often tell people that if you really want to see distance education, go to one of those lecture-hall classrooms,” she says.

One way of getting a jump on plagiarizers is to ask every student to write a 500-word essay at the beginning of the semester that can serve as a kind of fingerprint of writing style. The topic isn’t important -- it can be the student’s summer vacation or the family cat -- as long as the essay can serve as a reference point to help a professor spot a paper that isn’t an original work later in the semester.

“I guess that’s kind of sneaky, but it gives the faculty the upper edge,” Ms. Hardy says.

Professors can also use on-line chats and discussion boards to get to know students better. Chats and discussions generate text that is recorded, so an instructor can refer back to it after assignments are turned in.

“You can always have a ringer or a pigeon in any environment,” Ms. Hardy says. “If you can keep that up for a whole semester, you’re doing pretty good.”

Whether a ringer or Grover, Ms. Hardy agrees that it’s a little tougher to catch cheaters on line. But if professors remain vigilant and take reasonable precautions, they’ll probably be able to nab the offender, she says.

Luis Nazario, a composition professor at Pueblo Community College in Colorado, says that during his six years of teaching on line, he has had three instances of students trying to cheat. Each time, he could tell intuitively that the students had received some extra help when completing their assignments.

The best way to weed those students out, Mr. Nazario says, is through the proctored examinations that are required in the courses. “It’s my chance to get even,” he says.

Eventually, Mr. Nazario says, those students dropped out of the course.

Mr. Nazario also says he talks to his students over the phone at least three times during the semester to discuss each student’s progress, which helps him make sure these students are really who they say they are.

“Students are going to cheat in the classroom or out of the classroom,” he says. “I’m more concerned with the ones I didn’t catch.”

Mr. Stallings, of VCampus, based in McLean, Va., has taught courses at several colleges and maintains that it should be no easier to succeed at cheating on line than in a traditional classroom -- if the professor is as clever as the cheaters.

Professors can cut and paste just as well as students, he says, recalling that one of his students at Park College, in Missouri, turned in a paper that appeared to have been plagiarized. So Mr. Stallings copied a chunk of it into an on- line search engine and found the source, in the Library of Congress’s on-line archives. The paper got an F.

“It took about five minutes,” he says. “Everything is on a paperless, electronic form, so you can go out and find things easier than if it was typewritten.”

Mr. Stallings adds: “I will never say it’s virtually impossible to cheat in virtual classrooms, but it’s tough. You can’t hide in cyberspace.”

As a practical matter, he notes, virtual courses are most likely -- at least for the time being -- to attract continuing-education students, who he says are usually more ethical than traditional 19-year-old undergraduates.

When faced with a situation that may involve plagiarism, professors who teach on line and those who teach in the classroom should face the same burden of proof in undertaking an inquiry, says Ms. Wilson, of the Center for Academic Integrity.

Such charges, she notes, are usually evaluated like civil lawsuits -- a weighing of a preponderance of the evidence -- rather than a demand for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Inevitably, some cheaters are going to slip through the cracks.

“People are going to cheat on their income tax. They’ll cheat on anything,” Ms. Hardy says. “Our job is to make that more difficult for them.”

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