Online courses could help foster more cheating

The benefits of taking an online course are many: you work at your own pace, have the opportunity to spend the day in bed and can be educated cheaply and conveniently.

But the way some online classes are structured also makes it too easy to cheat.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article published in June said that as online enrollment increases, so does the number of people who find ways to cheat. 

Marcia Jones, customer service representative for the IU Department of Continuing and Online Education, said online classes are based on the honor system.

The penalty for cheating in an online course is the same as the penalty for cheating in an IU course in a physical classroom: Students can be academically dismissed.

Many online courses require students to take finals at a proctored testing site. Jones said students have bring identification, which makes cheating on finals extremely difficult.

“Basically, the lessons are designed to help learn the material, so if students are cheating and they don’t learn properly it will show in their exam grades,” she said.

IU professor Steve Higgs has been teaching campus’s oldest online class, J155: Research Techniques For Journalists, since it launched in 2004. The class is structured so students complete seven lessons independently and take a proctored final exam.

“We talked about cheating a lot when we created the class,” he said in an email. “Our solution was to heavily weight the final. ... Initially we made it 40 percent of the grade, but students complained that it was too out of proportion. We agreed and changed it to 30 percent, and everyone has been satisfied.”

Higgs said he knows that students group study, but he and his colleagues have no way of detecting whether students copy answers from each other due to the size of the class.

He then iterated that students’ work in the individual course almost always reflects their overall GPA.

“The class GPAs mirror almost perfectly the students’ overall GPAs,” he said. “In other words, students perform at the same level in our online class as they do in all of their classes.” 

Some online classes can be taken at different campuses and might not have a final that students have to be present for.

Senior Natalie Williams took an online C-228: Group Communications class through IU-Purdue University Indianapolis that consisted of readings, papers and a group project completed entirely through online communication.

“It was the same amount of difficulty as a traditional class, and the topic wasn’t something you could just Google. You actually had to do the readings,” she said. “People would have been able to cheat easier if there was an online final.”