The Rise of Cheating in a Virtual Age

By Caitlyn Gosa

Students and teachers alike have been struggling to navigate this online school world when assessing what one has learned.

Having the choice between in-person and virtual school has created a new dilemma for students: is there an advantage to taking a test at home?

“I’m going to take advantage of what’s given to me,” said one Great Valley junior. “And with the option to stay home to take a test, I’m going to take it.”

By staying home students have easy access to notes, the internet, and even peers for help without the supervision from teachers. "I've even heard of friends FaceTiming while taking tests together,” said one Great Valley sophomore.

Naturally, teachers have been forced to adapt their testing formats to account for cheating from the traditional in-class formats of the previous years. One way most teachers have attempted to level the playing field among those in the classroom and virtual students is making tests open note.

In addition, teachers have been combating cheating by utilizing timed tests, where the submission locks as soon as the class ends. It helps to prevent the use of the internet since it is time consuming to Google each individual question.

“You need to have some previous knowledge on the subject to finish in time; you can’t look up everything – it's impossible,” said one Great Valley student.

Teachers also have adopted test formats that include more open-ended questions. Unlike a multiple-choice question, open-ended ones require a student’s perspective and knowledge which is something more difficult to fake.

“This year there is an emphasis to explain and show work,” said one Great Valley senior. “The amount of writing I’ve done this year is like nothing before.”

Towards the beginning of this school year, some classes even attempted to use lockdown browsers, which would force students to stay on the tab with the test until it ended. This method quickly stopped.

“In my government class there were too many tech issues with lockdown browsers, so they were never used,” said one Great Valley student.

Although, there is a possibility that lockdown browsers could be fixed, it is only stopping one method of cheating. Is it worth it to use lockdown browsers when students likely have notes and multiple devices at hand? It’s likely that the obvious answer this question was the driving force behind halting lockdowns.

After conducting my student interviews, I met with our Great Valley Principal Dr. Heidi Capetola via Microsoft Teams to help offer some insight from the administrative point of view.

A topic we discussed was if there was knowledge of cheating with online students. I received the simple yet honest answer of “I don’t know.” Dr. Capetola further explained that it would be nearly impossible to accurately know the scope of cheating this year.

She indicated that conversations have taken place with teachers, and as previously mentioned, they are adapting their tests accordingly to prevent students gaining unfair advantages.

"One teacher I spoke with said she had success by having her AP kids sign an honor code,” said Dr. Capetola. An honor code is a way of having students acknowledge and understand the types of cheating and pledging their integrity that they will avoid such unethical methods.

I posed many questions about in-class students compared to virtual students in terms of attendance to gain clarity on if more students are making a choice to stay home on a testing day.

“There are hybrid kids, we have gotten feedback, that will stay home on a test day,” said Dr. Capetola. “However, at this point I don’t want to assume anything concerning why or whether they are cheating, but there are students that chose to be virtual on test days.”

Because administration cannot know the full extent of cheating at GVHS this year, there is no policy or ways of detecting that can be put into place that could prevent this presumed cheating.