{"id":2310,"date":"2011-02-25T13:05:08","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T19:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com\/tlb\/?p=2310"},"modified":"2019-03-27T14:29:37","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T19:29:37","slug":"when-is-it-cheating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com\/tlb\/when-is-it-cheating\/","title":{"rendered":"When is it cheating?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Check<\/a> Is it cheating when a student does a search for test answers on the internet?<\/p>\n

I don’t mean conducting research on the Civil War in order to study for a test. I mean, what if the student enters search terms in Google to find the answers to “Mr. Johnson’s 10th grade American History Civil War exam” to find out the answers to the exact test which they will be taking in the hopes (or knowledge) that a previous student has posted the information online.<\/p>\n

Most of us would come down on the side of “Yes, that is cheating.” or at least an attempt to cheat.<\/p>\n

So, how should we respond when a teacher <\/em>is the one looking up test answers?<\/p>\n

We at PLB were confronted with that very question this week because someone, to remain anonymous, was searching the internet for answers to quiz questions for one of Professional Learning Board’s courses. We’re not sure why someone was looking for quiz answers as we let teachers take our quizzes over if they don’t pass and we allow teachers to review the content in between quiz attempts in order to address the questions they did not get correct. Besides, our course content is copywritten and posting our information publicly would be a violation of our terms of use and illegal.<\/p>\n

The Professional Learning Board quiz process is all about helping a teacher understand the content because most teachers participating in our courses want to both learn the content as well as be able to demonstrate that understanding and use what they learn in their classrooms.<\/p>\n

That being said, there are things that can be done to help ensure understanding versus memorization such as randomly pulling quiz questions from a bank of questions and randomizing the answers within the questions so every quiz attempt is different than the one before. Imgaine if you could give a test in which every student gets a different version and it is all graded automatically for you. If you like that idea, you should look into using online education tools as part of your classroom. But that’s for another newsletter.<\/p>\n

Back to the topic of cheating. Technology is great. It can make our lives as teachers and learners far easier than in the past. You may remember having to travel to the library to conduct research from the encyclopedia Brittanica or look up books in the card catalog. Now, within seconds, a whole world of multi-media presentations, movies, articles and people await you at your computer and phone, from virtually everywhere.<\/p>\n

That same easy access to information and great use of technology leads some to cheat who might not otherwise: students posting (and searching for) test answers online. Others copy and paste text from the web into their term papers in the belief that no one will ever know.<\/p>\n

This week’s questions for you:<\/p>\n