In my last blog post, I posed the question, “Is everyone cheating during the pandemic?” While it may not be every single student, the statistics I found indicated that the amount of cheating in schools has shot up considerably since the beginning of quarantine. After writing that post, I began to get curious as to how teachers were reacting to this, so I decided to do a bit of research of my own.

Last Wednesday, I had a fascinating discussion with Mitch Martin, a journalism and English instructor in the Communication Arts department at our school. Martin has had to make significant changes to his course curriculum after concerns of the potential for cheating.

For many years, Martin has been giving the news quiz to his students at the end of each week. The news quiz is a multiple choice quiz about news from specific sources that he has told the students to read in advance. As someone who was once Martin’s student, I can speak from experience that the news quiz was a defining part of his class. Other students and I would always start class discussing the stories and what we thought would be on the quiz.

Two years ago when I was taking the course, Martin would be monitoring Hapara as we took the quiz, and we would have to recall the information from the news and answer the questions using what we could remember. However, after shifting to remote learning, Martin made the call that he couldn’t keep offering the news quiz in the same way he had been, citing concerns about a possible lack of academic integrity.

“I have never actually seen a student proof positive that they have cheated on a news quiz, but it seemed obvious to me that it would be super easy to do that because they could have their phone in front of them and look things up that were in the articles, or they could just Google it and find the answer,” Martin said. “Also, I started to see patterns. For questions that were easier to search, there would be higher scores on them. Scores from class to class would go up. Students who I would talk to during the week about the news who wouldn’t be aware of the news would suddenly get 100% on it.”

Martin went on to call the whole situation a “moral hazard.” The circumstances almost encourage you to be unethical, and as I touched on in my last post, it can become very easy to justify your own immoral behavior when everyone else seems to be doing the same thing. Here’s how Martin puts it:

As a result, Martin decided to make the news quiz open book, which, he admits, he is not too thrilled to do. He also added a synthesis section to the quiz, thinking that it would be more difficult to cheat on, though he said he’s not too sure if that’s actually turning out to be true.

Martin said that these are the sorts of changes teachers are making across the board. By his own estimates, possibly even 50 to 60% of what teachers are doing this year is entirely new. Another thing Martin noted is that students don’t realize there are a lot of assessments teachers aren’t even doing at all.

“An interesting question for a teacher is, ‘Do I give an assessment that I know is really flawed, or do I just not give it?’ The first time, the answer is clear- ‘I’m not going to give it.’ The second time, you’re pretty sure, ‘well, I’m not going to give that assessment,’ then you start to think, ‘I don’t know what these kids know at all, and I better try something,’” Martin said.

This is the thought process that goes behind these modifications to assessments. Martin said that upside to this is that he has made some discoveries about new ways to assess students better, like the synthesis part mentioned earlier. He will definitely be keeping this segment of the news quiz once students have returned to school entirely, though the news quiz will no longer be open book, and thinks many teachers will be making similar decisions when it comes to their new changes to their assessments. Martin speculated that there will be a tendency for teachers to give a lot less assessments in the future, and he hopes to see methods of evaluating students that are more meaningful and relevant.

However, many might be inclined to argue that it is more logical in the modern era to have students take assessments with full access to the internet, since that is how things will be as they enter into careers. Martin, on the other hand, believes that students still need to be able to have some working memory and be able to recall things from it- essentially, you can’t be starting from scratch every time, at some point you need to know something. He argues that we are so dependent on technology that we won’t remember anything at all.

Despite concerns about learning and social habits, Martin is still hopeful for his students’ future, and tries to tell them that.

“They never believe me, they think I’m just being nice, but they really have shown a lot of resilience through this… there might be some resilience that you guys get out of this that other kids haven’t had. I think that’s the positive thing,” Martin said.

I’m interested to see if Martin’s theories about the future of our students and education turn out to be true, and I’m certainly hopeful that after this pandemic, the potential positives of increased resilience and improved assessments outweigh the negatives of this year of moral hazard. With the last few months of school, we can all do our best to avoid any slippery slopes and can come out of high school as better people with the great qualities that this pandemic could result in.