Who’s Cheating Whom?: Authentic Assessment and A Debate Between Security vs Pedagogy

Several years ago I was asked to address the issue of cheating in online courses for a large, notably visible college at my institution. Being a distance education “expert,” I was asked specifically to discuss the latest means by which we could monitor distance education students as they completed requisite, high stakes exams at a distance.

My first response was a question: How do we monitor students taking tests here on campus?

This was not the answer my colleagues wanted to hear. Never mind that proctored exam halls still had cheating issues. Actually, the term security issues was how my esteemed colleagues dubbed the matter.

I was then asked to share what I knew about the latest digital lock-down systems which essentially shut off all other applications on a student’s computer except the exam software. These new software systems would record every key stroke, how long each student lingered on each question, as well as time stamp their entry and exit. There was even an option that required students to purchase a digital camera and have it turned on to record their every move (PCs were required by this system; Macs were verboten). The company offering the solution would manage this process or turn it over to us for a large, sumptuous fee.

I suggested to my colleagues that the real issue here was not a matter of security, that it was pedagogical issue. I suggested that the cheating that took place is a result of the way in which students’ knowledge was being examined.

At this point, you could hear a pin drop. Unfazed, I went on to show how research confirmed that most single-instance multiple choice exams did not lead to deeper student knowledge (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000) and how authentic assessments – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – were a much more robust measure of student learning.

After my brief explication, the elephant in the room introduced him/her self. Clearly, the faculty experiencing the security issue was not interested in authentic assessment. They were simply interested in assessing student work with maximum efficiency and at the lowest personal cost. This was/is a research university after all, where faculty are rewarded for their research abilities and not their teaching acumen. By inviting the distance learning expert, they were expecting a technical answer to what was perceived as a technical problem. Instead they got me – a guy with technical savvy and knowledge who is more interested in innovative and meaningful teaching practice.

Next!

So it was was with a certain level of dysphoria that I stumbled on this New York Times article titled To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery showcasing the ill effects of inauthentic student assessment. The comments offer some salvation and hope, yet overall the author of the article seems unfamiliar with the larger issue of pedagogically unsound assessment techniques practiced by many leading institutions across the U.S. While the article offers a report of the situation plaguing many higher education institutions, it fails to point to the real culprit: irresponsible assessment practice.

For educators
If you are comfortable assessing student work using multiple choice tests, comfortable in the belief that the tests you use accurately and meaningfully measure student knowledge and ability, then peace be with you. If you believe deep down that you are shirking your educational responsibility and are only creating more opportunities for students to cheat, leaving your class with (maybe) a superficial understanding of your content, then I suggest you investigate the topic of authentic assessment. Here, let me Google that for you: authentic assessment.

If your aim is merely to monitor performance then conventional, multiple choice testing is probably adequate. If your aim is to improve student performance, then the tests must be composed of exemplary tasks, criteria and standards.

As Grant Wiggins (1990) deftly notes, that while the scoring of standardized tests ” is not subject to significant error, the procedure by which items are chosen, and the manner in which norms or cut-scores are established is often quite subjective–and typically immune from public scrutiny and oversight.”

Clearly, genuine accountability does not circumvent human judgment. We regularly take steps to monitor and improve our ability to assess through training sessions, model performances, oversight policies, as well as through such basic procedures as “blind reviews” – as occurs regularly across professional, athletic, and artistic worlds in the assessment of performance.

Most importantly, authentic assessment provides parents and community members with “directly observable products and understandable evidence concerning their students’ performance; the quality of student work is more discernible to laypersons than when we must rely on translations of talk about stanines and renorming” (Wiggins, 1990).

In the end, what you assess is what you get. To improve student performance we must first acknowledge that essential intellectual abilities are not accurately reflected through conventional testing, and second, move toward more authentic systems of assessment that more meaningfully measure and represent student and teacher abilities.

References:
Darling-Hammond, L. & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5-6), 523-545.

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2).

Image: Cheating in Exam from crazy_foolish4u