What could we do against academic fraud in university courses?

In my previous blog post, I described how the University of Tartu cheats the state and the society. In brief, the rules of the University and also a law of the country settle that students must be graded according to how their achieved skills match the expected learning outcomes. In an ideal case, the list of expected learning outcomes of every course should define what grade will correspond to which possible sets of achieved skills. Still the authorities of certain institutes of the university (e.g., the Institute of Computer Science where I worked) demand that the lecturers give positive grades to at least a certain percentage of students or even that the distribution of grades be "nice" (whatever it means). The expected learning outcomes are formally fixed by the authorities for every course as officially regulated, but in reality, following these regulations is more or less a spectacle. I have never seen an authority of that institute being worried about the correspondence between grades and achieved learning outcomes.

In this post, I will focus on a specific part of the phenomenon, namely academic fraud and the widespread unconcern for it among the university lecturers and students. A popular point of view in the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu, both among the lecturers and the students, is that a grading system that allows up to 20% of exam points to be achieved via cheating is still acceptable. Unfortunately, even the honest students often share this position. With this argument, the lecturers justify giving exam points during the course for homework consisting of easy training exercises, in the case of which it is nearly impossible to recognize illegal help having been used. My long experience in the University of Tartu, both as a student and as a lecturer, show that many students indeed cheat but only a small fraction of the cheaters are ever caught. There are several reasons for the low discovery rate. Proving that somebody has cheated is hard. Many lecturers are just not willing to deal with the cheaters or even deny their existence in advance. Asking students face-to-face is typically unrealistic in the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu because the number of students is very large. Even if the lecturer does it, most of the claimed authors are perfectly able to explain solutions that they had not created themselves. The missing skills are revealed by the fact that the same students are not able to do another exercise in classroom using the same techniques. Being able to explain a given solution and being able to create a solution are very different skills!

If a university is not able to distinguish between honest students and cheaters, it is like a test environment in the web that may grade your answers automatically but only you can know if the grading can be taken seriously. However, university diplomas, as well as grades given by the university, are statements made by the university with the authority of the university. They are not statements of the students not concerning anyone else. With a grade sheet, the university confirms a certain level or skills being achieved by the student, and this information is expected to be valuable to potential employers. So the university is responsible for the grades stated on the grading sheet not having come up by means of cheating. In particular, a lecturer who gives excessively high grades because of ignoring the fact that some students use illegal help also becomes a cheater and essentially a partner of these students in making a fake impression of a more successful educating process.

With this, I am not claiming that a university must guarantee 100% correct grades. Nobody is perfect and universities do make mistakes. But as long as the amount of grading mistakes caused by cheating students is much larger than the amount of mistakes caused by inevitable human errors, the problem of cheating must be addressed. It is typical in the University of Tartu that every additional 10% of exam points reflects as 1 higher grade point. For instance, a student getting 60% of possible exam points is given an E (barely acceptable), one getting 70% of possible exam points is worth a D (satisfactory), 80% of possible exam points means a C (good), etc.. Applying this marking scheme encompasses an assumption that the lecturer is able to measure the students' skills truthfully with precision of 10% of exam points. No way to accept 20% of exam points being achieved via cheating!

Allowing 20% of exam points to be achieved via cheating causes real damage. Such grading system is often advocated with claims such as "20% of exam points would not enable students to pass the course without any skills" and "Students cheat only for passing the course rather than getting good marks". The second claim is just wrong as shown by my experience as a student and as a lecturer. Students often cheat as much as they can and as long as they think is safe. This makes the first claim also inadequate as an argument in favour of the 20% rule because students who could pass anyway can also seemingly raise their academic achievement via cheating. An unfairly obtained 20% of exam points can considerably improve an average student's ranking. Even though IT companies do not take university grades into account when hiring new people (they know very well that the university grades lie), grade rankings are used for giving scholarships and other benefits in the university. If the ranking is unfair then the benefits may go to people who do not deserve them.

Students, including the honest ones, often defend permission to do work graded with exam points at home because this is more convenient than testing in classroom and leads to higher grades. The students should however understand that this gives similar benefits to other students, too, and the risk of some students taking an extra advantage by using illegal help increases substantially. As a result, offering exam points for homework worsens rather than improves the relative position of honest students. Even worse, obligating students to compete under conditions where other students are likely to use illegal help provokes students who would otherwise never consider cheating as an option to also use illegal help. This way, university being unconcerned about academic fraud actually helps to disseminate cheating and reinforce it as a normality.

University of Tartu staff members sometimes defend themselves by referring to the fact that the world top universities do not apply stricter rules against academic fraud. This argument ignores the differences between the students in different universities. The world top universities have a huge number of student candidates from countries over the whole world and only the strongest and most motivated ones are admitted. On the other hand, the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu works hard to allure as many potential student candidates as possible, and actually admits several hundreds of Estonian young people to the bachelor curriculum in computer science every year. As a consequence, the amount of cheating in the world top universities may indeed be so small that stricter rules are unnecessary, which is definitely not the case in the University of Tartu. If the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu continues admitting hundreds of students every year, the only way out of the hell of cheating is to stop offering exam points for homework unless the nature of the homework enables the lecturer to recognize plagiarism (and the lecturers actually use this ability and the cheaters get punished).

Similarly, I have heard the University of Tartu staff defending themselves by indicating that their practise is recommended by research in education. Again, this research clearly does not take into account the rate of cheating. This recommendation may be adequate in cases where the amount of cheating is marginal, but not in the bachelor level courses with hundreds of students in the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu. As told already, a lecturer who gives students grades that do not correspond to their achieved expected skills is also a cheater. No serious research can ever recommend lying or assume that the honest students must just silently agree with unfair grading.

Sometimes people who defend offering exam points for homework refer to the majority of students who are in favour of it. What value does this have in an argumentation? People in democratic countries are used to thinking of democracy as something essentially moral, but this assumption is false. Democracy is based on the power of majority (as opposed to the power of a dictator). Morality of such decisions depends on the level of morality of the voting people. If a majority of people votes for making robbings legal or even compulsory then this does not make robbing moral. Or similarly, smoking indoors damages the non-smoker's health in the same room just as the smoker's own health; hence smoking indoors is not moral even if a majority of people were smokers and would vote for that. And if an airport decided to omit security checks due to an alleged vote by a majority of passangers, you probably would not consider it a moral decision (suppose that the decision were done only based on the hypothetical vote, without, for instance, a risk re-estimation by experts). So, even if a majority of students vote for having exam points for homework, the remining students are not morally obliged to accept this decision, as this enables others to gain advantage over them via cheating. By the way, should a university, if a majority of the society demanded teaching unscientific ideologies as truth, indeed do it? Certainly not.

It is worth to say a few words about plagiarism detection software. In the arts and humanities, such software may indeed be useful for discovering anomalies of authorship. However in natural sciences like math and computer science, capabilities of such software are very much limited. Training exercises in natural sciences typically have only a few correct solutions of reasonable length. As a consequence, if homework consists of such exercises then many solutions submitted by students are inevitably similar to each other (provided that they are correct). I have not used plagiarism detection software myself but my former colleagues in the University of Tartu who have used such software have told that the software discovers an enormous number of similar pairs and it is quite hopeless to distinguish between cases of real plagiarism and cases where the similarity of solutions is a pure coincidence. So, plagiarism detection software does not help to discover cheating in homework consisting of standard training exercises, whence using such software is not a convincing argument in favour of offering exam points for such homework. Moreover, cheaters may procure solutions from people outside the course. In such case, their solutions might look original regardless of the complexity of the task.

There is one more argument used to defend offering exam points for homework consisting of standard training exercises. It is ridiculous but I have to comment on it since it appears quite frequently. Namely, lecturers claim that if they did not promise students exam points then most students would skip homework altogether, learn less, show up to the tests unprepared and maybe fail the course.

This argument clearly reflects the admittance policy of the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu. The numberless students are not interested in learning computer science. They do not see homework as anything useful by itself. Instead, they treat studying in the university as something like trading. Their mentality says: Okay, guys, give me exam points, then I do "your" homework.

Let's put this situation into another context to show the ridiculousness of the argument. Suppose that smokers, being disturbed by laws that restrict smoking, decide to strike against the restrictions and come back to work only after these laws are abolished. Should the society surrender to the smokers' requirements? I suppose that, should this particular case ever take place, the authorities would do their best to avoid surrender. Even if the worst happens and these laws are abolished, non-smokers are not morally obliged to accept the smokers' terror and may respond by taking their own steps. But what does the university do? Just gives up? And the honest and motivated students also just let it happen?

Anyway, if students refuse to do homework because they do not get exam points for it then their low skills and low marks will be entirely their own fault. Omitting exam points for homework does not make doing homework any harder. Students could even more easily submit their attempts to the lecturer, because they would not have to be afraid of a low score, and the lecturer could give them feedback without becoming a liar, even if the submitted work was not done on their own. But this is somehow very hard to understand. Let me explain once more since this is important: Verbal feedback to answers submitted by a student can be given without any reference to the student's skills, and such feedback can be truthful regardless of the authorship of the homework; however exam points influence the final grade which is supposed to reflect the student's skills rather than the quality of particular test papers, so giving exam points for plagiarism definitely qualifies as cheating.

To cap it all, lecturers often think of awarding exam points for homework as an empathic act and frame not doing it as an indicator of missing empathy. This "empathy" is, for some reason, selective, preferring dishonest students to honest ones. I would rather call it arrogance. Anyone who thinks that this is empathic, please also think what the honest students feel when they realize that they have to compete for better ranking while the university does not protect them against cheaters. (Lecturers thinking that students who do their homework honestly would suffer from exam points not being awarded for their hard work reflects the same trader's mentality as described above. Let me repeat that exam points are not actually meant to be given for effort. Exam points are there to measure the achieved skills. Students who do more homework will hopefully do better in the exam and will get the points they deserve.)

I have heard a lecturer of the University of Tartu arguing that exam points must be offered for homework in order to communicate to students the fact that homework is useful. This sounds exactly like defending corporal punishment of children by saying that otherwise children would not understand the norms. A regardful parent finds a civilized way to communicate to their children the norms. Likewise, the university must communicate with students in a way that does not harm anyone.

But what to do then, if people whose mentality allows selling honesty for convenience keep leading the fashion among the university staff? Unfortunately, I do not know any means that would definitely solve or alleviate the problem in the near future. A very natural idea would be to prosecute the university in order to force the university to guarantee fair grading and perhaps pay for previously given wrong grades (indemnification to employers who have hired someone based on their grade sheet that turned out not to match their skills). But this would probably assume the laws to settle the rules and aims of grading more precisely than it is currently done in Estonia and also enact treatment of possible grading errors. So, perhaps this approach can work somewhere else but probably not currently here in Estonia. Nevertheless, it could in principle be a satisfactory solution in the presence of appropriate laws. This does not mean that, whenever a graduate of a university has failed to meet an employer's expectations, the university could be convicted. The court would of course make different decisions based on the details of each particular case, but a possibility to convict universities of wrong grading would discipline universities even before the first case reaches the court. (There already exists a possibility for students to prosecute their university grades, if a violation of a previously announced grading rule has occurred. What I am proposing is a possibility to convict the university if the grade does not match the student's skills. Then the university is also forced to take care of the expected skills being tested indeed.)

I do not address this post to legislators, because the demand should become more broad-based before turning to the legislators. The demand must preferably come from those who primarily suffer from the current state of the art, i.e., students who appreciate honesty and justice. Therefore, I address my post primarily to the honest students studying in the Institute of Computer Science the University of Tartu or other schools and institutes where the same issues are topical. You have to fight for fairness and transparency of grading. Usually the students who are best in their studies also have strong sense of justice and would deserve to be the opinion leaders among the students. Therefore, I address my post to them in particular. You might not feel that the cheaters could threaten you. This feeling is correct in the sense that it is quite unlikely that someone could get only or mostly the best grades with help of cheating. But this is not so for somewhat weaker students. However, they might not express their fear just because of expecting more authoritative students to raise this topic. So you can help them. Take up this topic, demand the practice of giving exam points for homework to be abandoned by lecturers (unless it is granted within the bounds of reason that cheating cases can and will be discovered). Aim that both cheating by lecturers and cheating by students be condemned. Consolidate and organize actions against cheater-friendly grading, until you succeed.

There are two important things to know.

Firstly, you can expect the university to stop using grading systems that enable students to obtain exam points via cheating, even if a majority of students support such grading systems. As explained above, a democratic vote cannot abolish fundamental human values. Telling truth is one of the fundamental human values, so a vote cannot oblige a lecturer of a course to give grades if their justness is unclear.

The history of democracy is long and not all values accepted by majority nowadays were accepted by majority a hundred or even fifty years ago. For instance, the voting rights for women were generally accepted about a hundred years ago only. The prevailing attitude towards sexual minorities has become much more liberal since 1950s (it suffices to remind what happened to Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, in the democratic UK). Assuming that democracy is ready now would be silly.

Changing the prevailing opinions has never been easy and has always required breaking some generally accepted rules. For instance, people who fought for voting rights for women repeatedly organized actions that were not all legal. Getting the cheater-friendly grading systems to be abandoned may also require actions that are not allowed by official rules. I think that, if normal measures have proven unsuccessful, honest students could obstruct carrying out test papers and exams in courses where cheating can substantially improve grades. If obstruction sounds too drastic, just refusing to do exams in such courses could also be effective. Unfortunately, I am not able to predict the consequences of these actions. There is a risk of expulsion, even if the strikers are the most brilliant students. However, the strikers can turn such scenario against the university in media channels with a strong message: The university kicks out excellent students who protested against toleration of academic fraud. Perhaps this might prevent the bad scenario from becoming reality.

Anyway, as grading of all students in a course forms a whole, actions during any part of final grading of the course are justified (not only during the problematic ones). And the new grading rules must definitely apply to all students, not only to those students who demand it (if the cheaters could continue cheating in homework while others get exam points for classwork only, the results would be even more unfair).

Secondly, please note that you are not obliged to prove that cheating has taken place indeed. Proving this would be necessary if your aim were achieving cancellation of cheaters' results afterwards. Instead, I call you to fight for preventing the final grades from being affected by any potential cheating. For that, it is enough to have a serious doubt that cheating might substantially affect the final grades and the anomalies could not or would not be properly addressed after cheating is let to take place.

Similarly, there are generally accepted rules that do not allow people with conflicts of interests to act as an opponent, a judge, etc.. These are roles where discovering afterwards that cheating or some other unwelcome action has taken place is quite unlikely. Therefore, high risk cases are prevented in advance. Note that the rules delineating conflicts of interests and thereby defining who is allowed to act as a judge are somewhat arbitrary. A judge may have secret sympathy for someone who is not normally considered as giving rise to a conflict of interests. In such case, if the judge wants to cheat, he or she can easily just hide the fact of being biased. So the measures applied in cases of conflicts of interests are providing only partial help. It is hard for me to estimate how much these measures actually help (without having done any research on this matter), but it seems to me that the fall of the rate of improper decisions due to these measures only is not very large. On the other hand, replacing homework with work in classroom can reduce the number of cheating cases drastically. If so, applying stricter measures against academic fraud would be even more justified than the usual measures against conflicts of interests (provided that we consider the consequences being of similar severity).