Five Ways to Stop Cheating

1. Having problems with plagiarism? Try this: Have your students write their rough drafts during class; and then post them. I should back-track. In my class, all students have their own blog. So when I give them an assignment, I have them post it online in draft and final form. Posting rough drafts both cuts down on plagiarism (which is often the result of lack of guidance) and gets students into the habit of re-working their writing.

2. Having problems with Scantron cheating? Try this: Don't give Scantron tests. I'm a firm believer that multiple choice tests were invented by pencil manufacturers. I mean, really now, can you give me any example of a pre-industrial teacher giving a multiple choice test? Yet we think of it as a "traditional" model of assessment. Insanity. Could you imagine Socrates giving Plato a Scantron test? No, you can't. Because that would be ridiculous. Yet many of us continue to give these tests to our kids every week.

3. Having problems with students cutting and pasting from the Internet? Try this: Have students write short essays that are completely cut-and-pasted. Then have them trade essays with classmates. The assignment is to identify where each of the cut-and-pasted parts come from and to give an assessment of the site or page from which each source was stolen. Because kids aren't going to understand that cutting and pasting doesn't get them anywhere until they start understanding just how bad the essays at 123helpme.com really are and why encyclopedias are not considered primary sources.

4. Having problems with students using cellphones, Twitter, and IM in class to cheat on tests? Try this: Require them to use cellphones, Twitter, and/or IM during tests. I started opening up all of my tests last year. I basically allowed students to collaborate with one another whenever they wanted to using Twitter. And guess what? Across the board, student understanding of the material went up. It's not that their test scores improved whereas everyone was now cheating their way to an 'A'; in fact, the scores remained pretty similar in terms of the ratio across the student population. Rather, students who had been having trouble -- whether due to test anxiety or little mistakes that snowballed -- were now getting beyond those problems and beginning to demonstrate what they knew rather than what they didn't know. And before long, they were able to use Twitter as a lifeline rather than as a crutch.

5. Stop giving tests. The number one reason kids cheat is because of the amount of importance we assign to tests. Why do we do this to ourselves? Outside of school, how often do kids face tests set up like the ones they take in school? This year, I've instituted a new grading policy: no tests. Instead, kids earn points for blogging, bookmarking, and developing their own projects. All the stuff I used to assess by tests, I'm assessing in class in a no-anxiety formative way. And so the kids don't cheat. Because to cheat in my class would be like trying to cheat in pottery class.