12 ms·

cheating was absolutely rampant when I was in college getting my CS degree. and that was with tests taken in person with the professor in the room! I'm sure stu

cheating was absolutely rampant when I was in college getting my CS degree. and that was with tests taken in person with the professor in the room! I'm sure students are even more brazen when all assignments are done at home. I think at the very least, all exams ought to be designed as "open book" with a time limit. that at least eliminates the issue of students using unauthorized resources. I'm not sure what can be done about students who collaborate on exams or go so far as to hire someone to take it for them. perhaps a few students could be randomly selected for each assessment to explain a few over their answers over zoom?

lostcolony 6y ago
With a CS degree a better solution is make it project based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.
  - professoretc 6y ago
    > actual work for the teaching staff It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      Speaking as someone who TAed a couple years: I much preferred grading projects to tests. Projects they had to demo, and they had a published rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the rubric, it still meant there was very little work to figure out a grade. Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all kinds of problems with actually testing anything.
    - Turing_Machine 6y ago
      Yeah, I've done it. Both as a TA and as instructor of record. The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > actual work for the teaching staff Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated testing instead of having the time to actually know more about their students' performance. That in turn makes it easier for students to cheat. The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The individual participants are merely suffering from the perserve incentives of the system.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      more likely, have TAs write the variations while paying them the state minimum wage. arguably a feature if that means you need to hire TAs. a lot of students need work-study as part of their financial aid package.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    Your answer indicates you don't really understand the intent nor desires of university profs. It's not to be the best version of the teachers you had in grade school. We can argue if this is THE best approach, but it is how the system is set up.
    - Turing_Machine 6y ago
      I taught at a Big 10 university for 12 years, both as a TA and as instructor of record. So I think I actually understand the system pretty well. Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say? If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can. Or so I see it.
- nradov 6y ago
  Sure projects are generally better than exams. But cheating on projects and papers is also rampant. Students just pay someone else to do the work.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Projects also need to change dramatically year after year or else people will just get the project from the year prior.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      They can change slightly (even if someone gets the project from a prior year and modifies it a bit, that still requires understanding), or they can be open ended enough to be obvious if someone directly cheats (i.e., the 'create a game for the Game Boy Advance' project I had)
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Which presumably is why a lot of mine also included demos followed by questions about the implementation.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    Here's my solution to this: 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort. 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation. 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has guaranteed access to screen recording software, I force my students to record an explanation of their work. They go through their code line by line and explain it to me. I can tell very quickly when a student is explaining code they haven't written. If they are explaining code they haven't written to a satisfactory degree, then they've at least demonstrated they've learned something. 4) Remove incentives to cheat. Give them all the resources they need and more than enough time. Provide easily accessible venues like chatrooms and forums where they can ask questions anonymously. Provide opportunities to improve prior poor grades so they feel like failure is okay. This doesn't eliminate cheating 100%, but from my experience it does seem to cause cheaters to fail, as their cheating does not pass for acceptable work. The students who earn an A come to see me during office hours and I know they are doing the work. I would say very rarely does someone earn an A who is not on my radar as being an obvious high-performing student. If a student is cheating and earning an F or D, I can't say I care much about that. Notice none of these methods involve an invasive surveillance regime. I don't require cameras on at all time, 360 degree views of work areas to prove no one is helping, software to monitor tabs and processes... all this is completely futile. The students hate it and it incentivizes them to find ways to thwart it. They feel justified in doing so. I saw one post that advocated running a high speed fan to drown out typing noises, wearing reflective glasses in a dark room to foil eye tracking software, putting Vaseline on the camera... all to what end? To cheat on a psych exam? It's an arms race that's not worth fighting. The solution here is to adapt teaching methods with new technologies and testing methods.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  There's software to detect copy-pasted code or plagiarized (it analyses the syntax tree so renaming the variables and changing indentation won't fool it!). The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof. Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy to do if you wrote it yourself.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I have to wonder how well that analysis code works in practice. for a lot of intro-level (and some mid-level) course assignments, there's only one or two straightforward ways to write the code. sometimes these assignments are just pasting together sample code from the powerpoint with a couple tweaks. I was a TA for a few of these courses, and the correct solutions tended to be very similar. I was only sure students were cheating when they made several of the same mistakes. re the 1:1s with TA/professor, I agree. if you can explain code that you didn't even write, you might be even more deserving of that A.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      100%. We had similar software when I was a TA, and I just ignored it and left it to the professor to deal with. I found a few cases of obvious plagiarism though, for the exact same reason you mention, too - the same mistakes.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      It's completely useless for intro courses. But in my experience, intro courses are completely bimodal for CS: some students just get it and some just don't. Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in a more advance class they won't be able to fake it anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another major. And that gives the CS department one extra course they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs for...
    - amalcon 6y ago
      Yeah, this description immediately brought to mind FizzBuzz. In a C-like language, there's basically a whole 3 ways to write it without doing something esoteric (loop a switch, loop an if/elseif construct, try to be cute with independent ifs and a boolean).
MattGaiser 6y ago
Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_has_become.html https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_... https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1.5576990#:~:text=Research%20conducted%20between%202002%20and,%22written%20or%20test%20cheating.%22 https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....
- silexia 6y ago
  Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on degrees... Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing. As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.
  - batch12 6y ago
    I agree, but got mine later in life because not everyone does and I didn't want not being in the club to block some opportunities.
  - smolder 6y ago
    I don't think you want a doctor without a degree, and there are many similarly difficult professions with a lot of impact.
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      Yes and no. Doctors go to (effectively) trade school after undergrad, and it's actually that degree you care about. Does anyone care where they went to undergrad?
      - rjsw 6y ago
        Maybe in the US. Medical education in the UK starts at the undergraduate level, there is no pre-med.
ModernMech 6y ago
Since the pandemic began, I've been giving my CS students take home exams, and the results have been so great. They are open everything, including the internet, and the students have 4-5 days to work on the exam, which is a project. I just don't have the ability to police 150-200 students as to whether they are cheating. So I assume they will cheat, and give them a cheating-resistant exam. Instead of asking knowledge-based questions they can look up, I've moved to analysis and synthesis type questions, as well as more substantial projects. Pre-pandemic I would give them a paper exam in which they had to read and identify bugs, or write code by hand. This was the tradition. Now they actually use their tools to the best of their ability, and I get to see what they are capable of. You might think this testing paradigm would result in everyone getting 100%, but that's just not what I've seen. The distribution of grades the last exam was normal with a mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get during a typical semester. As we transition back to a classroom environment, I don't expect to move back to paper-based CS exams. They are just wrong on so many levels.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  You sound like a good teacher. My experience at university was that the good teachers were a minority. Most would do their research and the minimum for teaching.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure is predicated almost 100% on their research output and the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's just that their job isn't really teaching according to basically every signal sent their way by the admin.
    - LegitShady 6y ago
      I understand the incentives, but teaching is part of their job even if they need to do research, and from the student perspective they are bad professors. If all I needed was to learn it from the book/youtube/internet and take tests, there would be no need for professors and they wouldn't exist. I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn it from the book/online and show up for labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea how teaching worked. It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few will go on to research. They come to school to learn and earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from the other side of the school-desk.
mindslight 6y ago
At the university level, there is really no excuse for closed book tests. Quality tests focus on how well students understand the material, and have questions that are complex enough that attempting to learn the material while taking the test is infeasible.
dariosalvi78 6y ago
Is this the responsibility of teaching staff? They're not the police. in the end it's students responsibility to study, exams are just a way to make them understand that should. If they cheat they lose an opportunity to learn. They'll pay the consequences later, at work.
- ticviking 6y ago
  Their employer will pay the consequence later. The university will pay repetitional consequences for claiming that the student learned particular things which they clearly didn't.
jandrese 6y ago
This seems so insane to me. This isn't high school, you're going to be expected to actually use the stuff you are learning in just a couple of years when you're in the real world. Nobody is going to code for you after you've graduated and gotten the job. For that matter, how are you going to pass an interview if you don't know the material? Or are they cheating at the "take these courses to become a more rounded person" stuff, like the insect biology courses for the CS students? Still, you're paying a fuckton of money to supposedly learn stuff in college. Cheating your way through is a huge waste.
oxylibrium 6y ago
I think conversations about cheating are missing the forest for the trees - or the learning for the degree. I maintain that cheating is almost always a pedagogical problem first, and a trust problem second. Cheating becomes a convenient solution to a problem when you're dealing with a course with inadequate teaching, a difficult learning curve, or a lack of motivation for students to do their work to the best of their ability themselves, or a nonsensical curriculum. Fixing cheating doesn't involve surveillance - it instead involves removing the incentive structure that exists for cheating in the first place. This may involve rethinking grading, or course material, or assignments; but is certainly not impossible. We act surprised when students "cheat" in CS exams that's expected to be done with only pen and paper - nearly any real workplace will give you an option of a text editor or IDE of your choice. So give them an IDE! Give them the API documentation! Don't create an incentive to test the waters to fix the broken rules of assignments. Another relevant area of work is ungrading, or self-graded courses in general - when you remove the friction that grades cause in the feedback loop of learning; learning becomes an organic process for everyone involved. There's a lot of interesting pedagogical research, and just "cheating is rampant" doesn't scratch the surface of "but why is it?" In addition, cheating is a game. Every second you spend drumming up cheating in front of your students is another second they think about trying to get away with cheating you. If you tell students they're not to be trusted, they will not give you any reasons to trust them; in many cases it's as simple as that. A combination of good pedagogical design, and building a relationship of mutual trust with your students, is certainly more fruitful than creating an academic police state (of which Proctorio is only one part of). There will always be people slipping through the cracks, but there are other safeguards in the world to catch them too. Another important thing is that conversations about cheating always assume a very specific framing of higher education - that they exist primarily as a gatekeeper or arbiter of who-knows-what; the university also has the purpose of providing an environment for learning. And in many cases, cheating is just a result of a failure to provide that environment. In addition, if the primary beneficiary of university degrees are the employers (or the people who care about the who-knows-what stamp), then why do students foot the bill for tuition? If you choose to accept this framing of universities primarily as arbiters, isn't access to a degree just a head tax to enter the skilled labor market?

lostcolony 6y ago

With a CS degree a better solution is make it project based. Even if someone uses code found somewhere, just changing it up to not be obvious, that's not that different than actual industry, AND means they had to understand it at some level. And that's for stuff they -can- search for (such as 'implement a data structure/algorithm').

Turing_Machine 6y ago
This is the answer. No one wants to hear this answer because it means actual work for the teaching staff (compared to, say, automated scoring of multiple-choice tests), but it is, in fact, the answer.
- professoretc 6y ago
  > actual work for the teaching staff It's not just "actual work", writing high quality tests and projects and then grading them is multiple full-time jobs worth of work. It's equivalent to interviewing 100 job candidates every week, forever.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Speaking as someone who TAed a couple years: I much preferred grading projects to tests. Projects they had to demo, and they had a published rubric. While it was possible sometimes to play to the rubric, it still meant there was very little work to figure out a grade. Tests, on the other hand, I had to dig in, understand what they were trying to do, figure out if it worked, and award partial credit. I guess the prof could have done multiple choice to make grading easy, but that has all kinds of problems with actually testing anything.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    Yeah, I've done it. Both as a TA and as instructor of record. The fact that the university doesn't provide adequate staffing is not an excuse for short-changing the students still further.
- munificent 6y ago
  > actual work for the teaching staff Actual work for the already incredibly underpaid, over-worked teaching staff. As the money dries up in university funding, teachers are stretched thinner and thinner. That forces them to rely more on automated testing instead of having the time to actually know more about their students' performance. That in turn makes it easier for students to cheat. The economics (as usual) are perverting the system. The individual participants are merely suffering from the perserve incentives of the system.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    more likely, have TAs write the variations while paying them the state minimum wage. arguably a feature if that means you need to hire TAs. a lot of students need work-study as part of their financial aid package.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  Your answer indicates you don't really understand the intent nor desires of university profs. It's not to be the best version of the teachers you had in grade school. We can argue if this is THE best approach, but it is how the system is set up.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    I taught at a Big 10 university for 12 years, both as a TA and as instructor of record. So I think I actually understand the system pretty well. Edit: teaching is part of the job, dude. It just is. If you asked the average taxpayer (you know, the ones who pay the base salary before grant money is taken into account) whether teaching is an important part of the job, what do you suppose they're going to say? If you don't want to teach, you need to find a job that doesn't involve teaching. If you accept a job that requires teaching, you're morally obligated to provide the best teaching you can. Or so I see it.
nradov 6y ago
Sure projects are generally better than exams. But cheating on projects and papers is also rampant. Students just pay someone else to do the work.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Projects also need to change dramatically year after year or else people will just get the project from the year prior.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    They can change slightly (even if someone gets the project from a prior year and modifies it a bit, that still requires understanding), or they can be open ended enough to be obvious if someone directly cheats (i.e., the 'create a game for the Game Boy Advance' project I had)
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Which presumably is why a lot of mine also included demos followed by questions about the implementation.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  Here's my solution to this: 1) Version control all assignments. I force them to make periodic commits throughout the week. If they want to copy a project wholesale, they have to do so in a way that takes a lot of time and effort. 2) Comparing bytecode. If they change the names of variables, comments, spacing, etc. these superficial differences will be lost in compilation. 3) Oral explanations. Now that everyone has guaranteed access to screen recording software, I force my students to record an explanation of their work. They go through their code line by line and explain it to me. I can tell very quickly when a student is explaining code they haven't written. If they are explaining code they haven't written to a satisfactory degree, then they've at least demonstrated they've learned something. 4) Remove incentives to cheat. Give them all the resources they need and more than enough time. Provide easily accessible venues like chatrooms and forums where they can ask questions anonymously. Provide opportunities to improve prior poor grades so they feel like failure is okay. This doesn't eliminate cheating 100%, but from my experience it does seem to cause cheaters to fail, as their cheating does not pass for acceptable work. The students who earn an A come to see me during office hours and I know they are doing the work. I would say very rarely does someone earn an A who is not on my radar as being an obvious high-performing student. If a student is cheating and earning an F or D, I can't say I care much about that. Notice none of these methods involve an invasive surveillance regime. I don't require cameras on at all time, 360 degree views of work areas to prove no one is helping, software to monitor tabs and processes... all this is completely futile. The students hate it and it incentivizes them to find ways to thwart it. They feel justified in doing so. I saw one post that advocated running a high speed fan to drown out typing noises, wearing reflective glasses in a dark room to foil eye tracking software, putting Vaseline on the camera... all to what end? To cheat on a psych exam? It's an arms race that's not worth fighting. The solution here is to adapt teaching methods with new technologies and testing methods.
908B64B197 6y ago
There's software to detect copy-pasted code or plagiarized (it analyses the syntax tree so renaming the variables and changing indentation won't fool it!). The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof. Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy to do if you wrote it yourself.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I have to wonder how well that analysis code works in practice. for a lot of intro-level (and some mid-level) course assignments, there's only one or two straightforward ways to write the code. sometimes these assignments are just pasting together sample code from the powerpoint with a couple tweaks. I was a TA for a few of these courses, and the correct solutions tended to be very similar. I was only sure students were cheating when they made several of the same mistakes. re the 1:1s with TA/professor, I agree. if you can explain code that you didn't even write, you might be even more deserving of that A.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    100%. We had similar software when I was a TA, and I just ignored it and left it to the professor to deal with. I found a few cases of obvious plagiarism though, for the exact same reason you mention, too - the same mistakes.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    It's completely useless for intro courses. But in my experience, intro courses are completely bimodal for CS: some students just get it and some just don't. Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in a more advance class they won't be able to fake it anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another major. And that gives the CS department one extra course they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs for...
  - amalcon 6y ago
    Yeah, this description immediately brought to mind FizzBuzz. In a C-like language, there's basically a whole 3 ways to write it without doing something esoteric (loop a switch, loop an if/elseif construct, try to be cute with independent ifs and a boolean).

MattGaiser 6y ago

Indeed. I think people here are underestimating the volume of cheating in school. It isn't a minority. It is an overwhelming majority if they think they can get away with it. https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_has_become.html https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2017/02/cheating_in_college_... https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1.5576990#:~:text=Research%20conducted%20between%202002%20and,%22written%20or%20test%20cheating.%22 https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-academic-cheating-1....

silexia 6y ago
Maybe we should stop endlessly pushing and insisting on degrees... Maybe skills tests in an interview process is not such a bad thing. As an employer, I don't care what piece of paper you have from what school. I only care about how well you can do the job I need to be done.
- batch12 6y ago
  I agree, but got mine later in life because not everyone does and I didn't want not being in the club to block some opportunities.
- smolder 6y ago
  I don't think you want a doctor without a degree, and there are many similarly difficult professions with a lot of impact.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    Yes and no. Doctors go to (effectively) trade school after undergrad, and it's actually that degree you care about. Does anyone care where they went to undergrad?
    - rjsw 6y ago
      Maybe in the US. Medical education in the UK starts at the undergraduate level, there is no pre-med.

ModernMech 6y ago

Since the pandemic began, I've been giving my CS students take home exams, and the results have been so great. They are open everything, including the internet, and the students have 4-5 days to work on the exam, which is a project. I just don't have the ability to police 150-200 students as to whether they are cheating. So I assume they will cheat, and give them a cheating-resistant exam. Instead of asking knowledge-based questions they can look up, I've moved to analysis and synthesis type questions, as well as more substantial projects. Pre-pandemic I would give them a paper exam in which they had to read and identify bugs, or write code by hand. This was the tradition. Now they actually use their tools to the best of their ability, and I get to see what they are capable of. You might think this testing paradigm would result in everyone getting 100%, but that's just not what I've seen. The distribution of grades the last exam was normal with a mean of 80%, pretty much in line with what I get during a typical semester. As we transition back to a classroom environment, I don't expect to move back to paper-based CS exams. They are just wrong on so many levels.

LegitShady 6y ago
You sound like a good teacher. My experience at university was that the good teachers were a minority. Most would do their research and the minimum for teaching.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  I'm teaching faculty, so I don't do research. Research faculty are right to prioritize their research -- they are incentivized to do so by administration. Their tenure is predicated almost 100% on their research output and the grant money they bring in. Teaching ability is an afterthought when it comes to tenure and promotion. It doesn't make them bad people or bad at their job, it's just that their job isn't really teaching according to basically every signal sent their way by the admin.
  - LegitShady 6y ago
    I understand the incentives, but teaching is part of their job even if they need to do research, and from the student perspective they are bad professors. If all I needed was to learn it from the book/youtube/internet and take tests, there would be no need for professors and they wouldn't exist. I've had professors that did more damage by 'teaching' (I use that term loosely) than if they had just said 'learn it from the book/online and show up for labs/tests/exams'. Mostly it was because they had no idea how teaching worked. It's a very faculty-centric view because from a student's perspective, the teaching is 99% of the school. Very few will go on to research. They come to school to learn and earn a degree. If the University cannot provide good teachers, they are not a good university. If a professor cannot teach, they are not a good professor. That isn't a moral judgement, its just the subjective judgement from the other side of the school-desk.

mindslight 6y ago

At the university level, there is really no excuse for closed book tests. Quality tests focus on how well students understand the material, and have questions that are complex enough that attempting to learn the material while taking the test is infeasible.

dariosalvi78 6y ago

Is this the responsibility of teaching staff? They're not the police. in the end it's students responsibility to study, exams are just a way to make them understand that should. If they cheat they lose an opportunity to learn. They'll pay the consequences later, at work.

ticviking 6y ago
Their employer will pay the consequence later. The university will pay repetitional consequences for claiming that the student learned particular things which they clearly didn't.

jandrese 6y ago

This seems so insane to me. This isn't high school, you're going to be expected to actually use the stuff you are learning in just a couple of years when you're in the real world. Nobody is going to code for you after you've graduated and gotten the job. For that matter, how are you going to pass an interview if you don't know the material? Or are they cheating at the "take these courses to become a more rounded person" stuff, like the insect biology courses for the CS students? Still, you're paying a fuckton of money to supposedly learn stuff in college. Cheating your way through is a huge waste.

oxylibrium 6y ago

I think conversations about cheating are missing the forest for the trees - or the learning for the degree. I maintain that cheating is almost always a pedagogical problem first, and a trust problem second. Cheating becomes a convenient solution to a problem when you're dealing with a course with inadequate teaching, a difficult learning curve, or a lack of motivation for students to do their work to the best of their ability themselves, or a nonsensical curriculum. Fixing cheating doesn't involve surveillance - it instead involves removing the incentive structure that exists for cheating in the first place. This may involve rethinking grading, or course material, or assignments; but is certainly not impossible. We act surprised when students "cheat" in CS exams that's expected to be done with only pen and paper - nearly any real workplace will give you an option of a text editor or IDE of your choice. So give them an IDE! Give them the API documentation! Don't create an incentive to test the waters to fix the broken rules of assignments. Another relevant area of work is ungrading, or self-graded courses in general - when you remove the friction that grades cause in the feedback loop of learning; learning becomes an organic process for everyone involved. There's a lot of interesting pedagogical research, and just "cheating is rampant" doesn't scratch the surface of "but why is it?" In addition, cheating is a game. Every second you spend drumming up cheating in front of your students is another second they think about trying to get away with cheating you. If you tell students they're not to be trusted, they will not give you any reasons to trust them; in many cases it's as simple as that. A combination of good pedagogical design, and building a relationship of mutual trust with your students, is certainly more fruitful than creating an academic police state (of which Proctorio is only one part of). There will always be people slipping through the cracks, but there are other safeguards in the world to catch them too. Another important thing is that conversations about cheating always assume a very specific framing of higher education - that they exist primarily as a gatekeeper or arbiter of who-knows-what; the university also has the purpose of providing an environment for learning. And in many cases, cheating is just a result of a failure to provide that environment. In addition, if the primary beneficiary of university degrees are the employers (or the people who care about the who-knows-what stamp), then why do students foot the bill for tuition? If you choose to accept this framing of universities primarily as arbiters, isn't access to a degree just a head tax to enter the skilled labor market?