Cheating was rampant in my high school. And that was with teachers watching us in brick-and-mortar, old-fashioned classrooms. I can hardly imagine how much worse it would’ve been if we’d taken our exams online.
But that’s the reality that many high school students will now face due to the coronavirus. Schools across the country have shifted to virtual education, and most recently, it was announced that the Advanced Placement exams, which award college credit to students who pass them for advanced high school coursework, will shift to an online test-taking format. This move is undoubtedly well-intentioned, but it could result in cheating on an unprecedented scale.
There was an interesting phenomenon in my high school in some classes, such as AP statistics, wherein almost all students would do very well in the class and get A’s, then fail miserably on the AP exam at the end of the year. Why? Well, the class was taught by a kind-hearted but clueless middle-aged man who actually believed students when they told him they needed to use their cellphones during in-class tests “as a calculator.”
The kind way of putting this is to say that high school students are under a lot of pressure. If you make it easy for them, they will cheat.
The College Board, the organization which administers AP exams, thinks it can circumvent this problem by having students take open-response digital tests that will “measure skills that cannot be derived by students’ having Internet access and access to chat rooms and phone calls and textbooks.” The organization also says it will use “anti-plagiarism software” — the same software students regularly circumvent in their regular classes and in college.
It’s cute, but incredibly naive, that College Board officials think their students, who are digital natives and more tech-savvy than you can imagine, won’t easily flout the test’s boomer-crafted restrictions and use technology to their advantage. I’d be absolutely stunned if there wasn’t a massive increase in the number of good grades received on the test this year.
There are some rare examples where schools and educational institutions seem to have pretty much eliminated cheating from online education, but these are few and far between. They require extremely strict rules and real-time camera monitoring — policies that the College Board has shown little indication it will adopt.
Of course, their lax approach may still offer an all-around better solution than canceling the tests altogether, causing students a massive headache, or having them in person, due to the very real threat the coronavirus poses to large gatherings.
But in my high school, this announcement would have been met with widespread cheers and the emptying out of the library in short order. So let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that online AP tests will be anything other than a walk in the park for most tech-savvy and ethically flexible students.
