Saturday, September 24, 2005

High-tech cheating comes to high schools

By Melissa Dahl / The Sacramento Bee

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Cheating on tests has come a long way from writing notes on the back of your hand -- and it's getting harder for schools to police as technology advances.

"It's a huge problem," said John Becker, principal of West Campus High School in Sacramento. "It's been going on pretty much since text messaging was born."

Instead of sneaking in a scrap of paper with answers scribbled on it, some students snap a picture of the paper with their camera phones. During the test, some students are so adept at text messaging that they can keep the phone in their pocket or under their desk, secretly sending answers to a friend.

"Some people text you during tests and ask if you know the answer to No. 3," said Amy Pederson, a 17-year-old senior at Sacramento's Folsom High School.

The number of high school students who admit cheating has steadily increased, said Don McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and one of the nation's top researchers of high school and college cheating. His most recent survey, published in June, found that 70 percent of students at public and private high schools admit to some form of cheating on tests.

Lance Chih has seen it.

"Last year in one of my classes we had a sub," said the 18-year-old senior at Folsom, "and students were distracting the sub while they took pictures of the test."

As schools fight the trend, some cell phone policies are changing. School districts such as Elk Grove Unified ban cell phones during school hours. Others, like San Juan Unified, allow students to use cell phones only during breaks and passing periods. (State law allows schools to set their own policies regarding cell phones.)

Despite efforts to curb technology-aided cheating, some teachers still have a hard time catching students. Several experts agree that when it comes to technology, students can get away with cheating when teachers just don't get it.

"A lot of the changes are so new that the younger generations are so adept at it, but the older isn't," said Susan Barnes, an associate professor in the department of communications at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York.

Some schools, like West Campus, require their teachers to attend workshops to help them understand the trend. Lauren Wilson, a 17-year-old senior at West Campus, said she once had a teacher collect students' cell phones at the door on test days.

But some teachers believe that although the methods of cheating have changed, the key to catching the cheaters is the same.

"A lot of this stuff is just a matter of monitoring the classroom," said Shannon Morgan, a math teacher at Folsom High School.

"You can tell just by their body language if they've got (a cell phone) out," said Sean Rivera, who's also a math teacher at Folsom. "You grow a third eye. ... We can just tell. Those of us who've been in the business long enough can tell when they have a phone out."

Some educators believe the problem is changing too rapidly to be quelled by conventional methods, and it's time that teaching methods evolved with technology.

"The days of teachers just getting up and lecturing ... those days are kind of over," said Mark Hyatt, president of the Center for Academic Integrity. "Especially the younger generation -- they want to be part of the action."

Like Hyatt, Barnes suggests that the only way to keep kids from cheating on tests is to change the tests themselves. Teachers should substitute multiple-choice or fill-the-blank-style questions with in-class essays or discussion questions, which demonstrate students' grasp of the information and are difficult to cheat on, Barnes said.

Some educators, however, think that cheating has always been, and will always be, a problem -- and that technology has just made it more sophisticated.

Although many parents insist that their children have cell phones for safety, Becker said most students use cell phones for chatting -- and some for cheating.

"Parents don't realize that at school they're calling their friends all day," Becker said. "You see kids in the hall calling kids on the other side of campus."

Becker wants parents to seriously evaluate whether their student needs a cell phone before buying one.

"We've gone through life without them before," Becker said. "It's one more thing we have to police; it's just something we shouldn't have to deal with."