43 min
The Score on Academic Integrity - Dr. Amy Smith of Straighterline & Dr. David Emerson of Salisbury University The Score
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- Education
On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Amy Smith, a longtime leader in online learning, and the Chief Learning Officer at StraighterLine, which provides low cost online college courses. Also with us is Dr. David Emerson, an Associate Professor of Accounting in the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland. Dr. Emerson and his colleagues conducted groundbreaking research on the different motivations for cheating in school.
Dr. Amy Smith (03:01):
[another] thing I think universities really owe students are accountability systems that are clear, that are well defined, and that are consistent. We often see in the research, and the literature shows us that a lot of times, a faculty member, for all the right reasons, will help a student out or try to manage or monitor cheating, and not really report it for a variety of reasons, and I'm sure we'll get into that much throughout this podcast, but that also goes around the actual accountability system the university sets up. So, universities, different colleges, different majors, different fields report incidents differently, and then that makes inconsistencies in the accountability. So, if I'm a student and I don't know how I'm going to be held accountable, like what's going to happen to me, I don't make a fully informed choice when I do make choices of how to navigate my education.
Dr. Amy Smith (16:05):
So, let's talk a little bit about deterrents, let me expand on that. So, take these 45,000 students. We have three things at StraighterLine that we set up to monitor or to prevent cheating, like you just have to try to prevent it. I'm going to go back to Dr. Emerson's opportunity, you just don't make it opportunistic. It isn't available. One way we do that is everything you turn in at StraighterLine, you have to turn in through turnitin.com. So, we have a mechanism to check, "Hey, is Amy's paper really Amy's, or did Amy borrow Catherine's paper, because it was a little bit better, and she submitted Catherine's sections as her own?" We definitely do that.
Dr. Amy Smith (16:43):
The second thing we also do is all final exams are live proctored. I mean, your browser will shut down if there is any hint of suspicious behavior in any way, while somebody's watching you take your exam. So, that's the second part. And the third thing that we do at StraighterLine is there's actually a team in the academics side of the house that watches postings, watches online constantly. This is their job, right? This is what they do, is make sure that Amy didn't decide to post a quiz somewhere online, and then everybody's got the answers to a StraighterLine course. So, we have preventative measures, which are, we feel, deterrents, but humans are humans, and that's actually what Dr. Emerson's talking about, that decision making that really happens. I'll pause with that. Dr. Emerson, thoughts about what I just said?
Dr. David Emerson (17:34):
I agree completely. I mean, it sounds like you're doing everything right within the online arena, right? Is denying them that opportunity, and like I said, we did find that these online real time lockdown browsers, and continuous monitoring, and proctoring of live exams, it is going to be effective, absolutely. I mean, the cheating behaviors I was referring to were unmonitored, unproctored, and the experiment that we did, when we implemented an online proctoring service, the incidence of cheating went down 87%. It went from about half, down to about 5%.
Dr. David Emerson (18:27):
So, it didn't eliminate it, but it greatly reduced it, because the problem is when you're using an online assessment integrity tool, it only works on a machine on which you're taking the assessment. There's no preclusion that prevents them from looking up the answer on a different device. Now, you state that you're not finding StraighterLine materials on other websites. Have you gone to Chegg to look to see whether or
On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Amy Smith, a longtime leader in online learning, and the Chief Learning Officer at StraighterLine, which provides low cost online college courses. Also with us is Dr. David Emerson, an Associate Professor of Accounting in the Franklin P. Perdue School of Business at Salisbury University in Maryland. Dr. Emerson and his colleagues conducted groundbreaking research on the different motivations for cheating in school.
Dr. Amy Smith (03:01):
[another] thing I think universities really owe students are accountability systems that are clear, that are well defined, and that are consistent. We often see in the research, and the literature shows us that a lot of times, a faculty member, for all the right reasons, will help a student out or try to manage or monitor cheating, and not really report it for a variety of reasons, and I'm sure we'll get into that much throughout this podcast, but that also goes around the actual accountability system the university sets up. So, universities, different colleges, different majors, different fields report incidents differently, and then that makes inconsistencies in the accountability. So, if I'm a student and I don't know how I'm going to be held accountable, like what's going to happen to me, I don't make a fully informed choice when I do make choices of how to navigate my education.
Dr. Amy Smith (16:05):
So, let's talk a little bit about deterrents, let me expand on that. So, take these 45,000 students. We have three things at StraighterLine that we set up to monitor or to prevent cheating, like you just have to try to prevent it. I'm going to go back to Dr. Emerson's opportunity, you just don't make it opportunistic. It isn't available. One way we do that is everything you turn in at StraighterLine, you have to turn in through turnitin.com. So, we have a mechanism to check, "Hey, is Amy's paper really Amy's, or did Amy borrow Catherine's paper, because it was a little bit better, and she submitted Catherine's sections as her own?" We definitely do that.
Dr. Amy Smith (16:43):
The second thing we also do is all final exams are live proctored. I mean, your browser will shut down if there is any hint of suspicious behavior in any way, while somebody's watching you take your exam. So, that's the second part. And the third thing that we do at StraighterLine is there's actually a team in the academics side of the house that watches postings, watches online constantly. This is their job, right? This is what they do, is make sure that Amy didn't decide to post a quiz somewhere online, and then everybody's got the answers to a StraighterLine course. So, we have preventative measures, which are, we feel, deterrents, but humans are humans, and that's actually what Dr. Emerson's talking about, that decision making that really happens. I'll pause with that. Dr. Emerson, thoughts about what I just said?
Dr. David Emerson (17:34):
I agree completely. I mean, it sounds like you're doing everything right within the online arena, right? Is denying them that opportunity, and like I said, we did find that these online real time lockdown browsers, and continuous monitoring, and proctoring of live exams, it is going to be effective, absolutely. I mean, the cheating behaviors I was referring to were unmonitored, unproctored, and the experiment that we did, when we implemented an online proctoring service, the incidence of cheating went down 87%. It went from about half, down to about 5%.
Dr. David Emerson (18:27):
So, it didn't eliminate it, but it greatly reduced it, because the problem is when you're using an online assessment integrity tool, it only works on a machine on which you're taking the assessment. There's no preclusion that prevents them from looking up the answer on a different device. Now, you state that you're not finding StraighterLine materials on other websites. Have you gone to Chegg to look to see whether or
43 min