How to Deal with Cheating in Your High School Science Classes [Episode 94]

Rebecca 0:00
You’re listening to episode number 94 of the secondary science simplified podcast. Welcome back and happy September. I am excited for new month to kick off a new series on grading practices that will wrap up our summer of podcast P D together.

Rebecca 0:18
I cannot believe the end is here. But before we wrap it up, I have so much I want to talk to you about in regards to grading. But I feel like before we talk about any grading strategy, or hack or tip, I need to address one of the hot topics around grading that I think is really unique to us secondary teachers. And that is cheating. Y’all I hate to say it, but cheating is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we are totally helpless here. In today’s episode, I’m going to share what to do in your classroom to best prevent it, how to respond when it does occur. And then we’re going to end the episode with specific tips. For those of you who use my It’s not rocket science resources. And I just kind of want to share how you can prevent cheating and kind of assure you if you are an It’s not rocket science resource user. So we’re gonna kick off this series on grading practices with the most depressing topic to me, just so then we can move on to more positive things like you grading way less this year. Okay, let’s dive in. This is secondary science simplified a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca joiner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students, and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time spent in your classroom? And actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place teacher friend. Let’s get to today’s episode.

Rebecca 2:06
All right. So I know I said at the top of the episode, this feels kind of depressing to me because I feel like the topic of cheating is just makes me feel sad. Okay, because the sad truth of cheating is where there is a will, there is a way, another way you may have heard this before his cheaters are going to cheat period. And I’m not saying that kids are entirely hopeless. But I don’t know if I’ve ever known a group of high school students that didn’t have at least one, but typically many in there that were prone to cheat. Okay, so it just, I don’t know, if it’s a survival mechanism. I don’t know if it’s like truly just as deep integrity and character issue, but they cheat and it’s going to happen. And it doesn’t matter. If you use textbook resources, if you purchase resources on TPT. Or even if you write every resource from scratch for yourself, they will find a way they will hack your computer, I’m sure to get an answer key. I mean, these kids are industrious, okay. And they’re, as my dad would say, from Rhode Island, they’re wicked smart. Okay, they will find a way to get to the answers. And I try to make this humorous because genuinely, it does make me so sad. I have such a strong sense of justice. I have such like a desire for fairness to a fault. Honestly, I actually really struggle with offering grace to my students. And I need to do more of that. So talking about cheating truly, like, I go from either being like, enraged to just being like, so sad about it. But I know a lot of you feel the same way. And so I want to equip you with this podcast episode. But I say all this to say, because this is something that really impacts me, like, I can’t just brush off cheating, I have no chill on a lot of things, especially not cheating. And so because of that, I want to encourage you that I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, I spent a lot of brain cells, a lot of hours on this. I’ve talked to so many different people about this. I’ve researched solutions. You know, I’ve done action research in my own classroom. So I have invested a lot of background research into this as the best way I can say it. And so I do feel like I have some hopefully helpful tips to offer you today. So here’s what I want to start with. And that’s what can you even do on the front end to prevent it like like we said cheaters are going to cheat but we still don’t have to, you know, leave bread crumbs out for them and just lead them to the front door. Okay, so what can we do to prevent it? First thing I will say and I feel like I gotta preface this, a lot of this I’m going to kind of just like throw at you today and we’re going to circle back to it over the next few episodes and talk in a lot more detail. But for the sake of this episode, I just got to get it to you. So the first I’m gonna say again, it’s kind of controversial. I barely grade anything for accuracy. Okay, and there’s a lot of reasons behind this which we’re going to dive into but nearly a Every formative assessment I am giving my students is either not graded, or it’s graded for completion. Because as we all know, some students don’t want to try if they’re not going to get anything for it. I’m doing like big air quotes here. So sometimes even just offering them like a 10 point completion grade is enough to make them put their pencil on the paper, if that makes sense. So I’m not grading things for accuracy. And what I found is that my students don’t feel this pressure or this urge to cheat as much, when they realize like, they don’t need to do this to get I don’t want them to do this just to get like a perfect grade. Like, they don’t have to do this to get it accurate, because I just want them to do it to learn. So I just want you to try, even if you don’t get it right, I find taking that pressure off of it having to be right when they turn it in or when my eyes see it makes them less likely to cheat, I have genuinely experienced that in my classroom. Okay, the only things that I do great for accuracy are things that are a lot harder for them to cheat on. So these would be things like labs, projects, and of course tests, which we’ll talk about later. And here’s why think about it. It is very hard as a teacher to truly catch someone cheating. We always have our hunches, you can really think you know, for sure, but unless you have, like so much evidence, you don’t want to be the person who’s telling an admin or telling a parent that their student is cheating. Okay, so we have to like figure out another way to do this. And so that’s where I just to avoid it, I try to make it so it’s a lot harder for me to even like know that they’re cheating, because again, a lot of and projects that you can’t, it’s so easy to catch someone cheating on a lab, because no two labs should ever be the same. Okay, now I know you’re like, they’re in lab groups. Okay. But yeah, they have the same numbers. But like, everything else can be different. And we’ll talk more about grading labs in a future episode. And here’s my other thing too, about like, not really grading a lot for accuracy. My problem is the students that do have integrity and are trying to do the assignment as they should on their own without cheating, they can sometimes get punished. Because if you’re grading all this stuff for accuracy, and someone else is cheating, they’re getting a better grade than the student that’s actually trying their hardest and just not actually getting it. And so I just like to eliminate that variable. And that’s why again, I’m not really grading much for accuracy at all. And any work that I am grading is done in class in person, period, you’re there is no way for you to ensure the authenticity and the reliability of an assessment. If you aren’t monitoring its completion. These kids cannot be trusted. You’re sending work home, I always tell my students, I assume the worst. That way, it surprises me. If you do any better than the worst, then I’m just like pleasantly surprised. I assume if I’m sending an assignment home, they are cheating period, whether that’s off of another student, whether that’s on the Internet, whether that’s using chat GPT or some other AI software, okay, so maybe you’re giving them an assessment, and you’re wanting to grade it for accuracy to see how much they know, you should not be giving it to them outside of class period, you should be doing it in class that way, at the minimum, you can always be walking around monitoring, making sure they’re not on their phones, if they’re not supposed to be or they’re not just copping down the person next to them. Or, I mean, you know, they slide it under their paper and just start writing. So you’re always monitoring when students are doing classwork. They’re doing a test in your room, you’re not just sitting at your desk grading, you are walking around constantly constant vigilance, that is what you’re doing. Now, if you’re listening, and you’re like, Well, where is I’m still doing part Virtual Teaching, or what about if we have another pandemic, and we’re in distance learning again, whatever. I said this in 2020. And I’ll say it again, if you are in a virtual teaching situation, I would not be getting any tests, no tests, there’s no way that you can ensure that what they’re doing is actually their work. And again, even if you’re like but I trust them, or we have this software, it punishes the kids that are actually doing it on their own. And then all these kids he’s got have got mom and dad in the back doing the tests with them. Or, you know, they’re Googling and off to the side on their iPad while they’re on the thing here. Even if you have your camera on them, like y’all, they will do whatever it takes to cheat. Like I said, cheaters don’t cheat. So I would not even do a test like that I would make all my assessments at home if I’m virtually teaching all creative, non traditional types of assessments, projects, things like that, that are gonna be a lot harder to cheat on. Again, where there’s a will there’s a way that we want to eliminate those variables. Okay, so I’m barely grading anything for accuracy. Most things are for completion. All work that I am grading is going to be done in class. I’m not grading anything done outside of class. And that leads me to my next point, which is I don’t do homework. Now. So many thoughts on this. More on this in epic So 96 coming in two weeks, so stay tuned in two weeks. I’ll talk more about why I don’t do homework. But this is one of the reasons they can literally copy any of it. And speaking of all the AI stuff in the chat, GBT, they can literally put in your homework assignment and have chat, GBT spit the answers out to them. And you can even you can train your chat GBT to even spit out work for you. Okay, so, again, like, it’s like, why do this just for them to go cheat? Like, um, to me, there’s no point to it. Not going to go on a tangent here. We’re already 10 minutes in. So I’m going to save that for episode 96. But I would not be doing homework. That’s another way to prevent cheating is like, okay, no homework, everything you’re doing is in my room with my eyeballs on you. Because I don’t trust you farther than I can throw you, which is not far. Okay. Now, when it inevitably happens, what do you do with it? How do you deal with this? I get emails about this all the time, you guys. And I’m always here to help always here to provide my opinion, try to encourage you give you my advice. But here’s the thing. This is an academic integrity issue. And thus, this is an admin issue, you need to get your admin on board with this. Whatever your mode of action is, for dealing with cheating, you need admin to back you up on it, and they need to be aware of it. Because if a kid is cheating in your class, they’re probably cheating elsewhere. And so this is bigger than just your classroom. And I genuinely believe the parent needs to know now, I interviewed my chemistry teacher, Zach Matson, I’ve interviewed him like 1000 times it feels like now all my best episodes are within episode 35. I think it is. And then definitely episode 1771. But back in episode 7071, we talked about cheating. And he likes to try to reason with the kid first, which is totally fine. Like he kind of tries to be like, Hey, you and I both know what happened here. Let’s kind of try to come up with a solution. So I don’t have to get your parents in the admin involved. If that works for you go for it, you got to do what’s best for your personality. For me, again, my bar justice, like, No, I’m not making a deal with you, I’m not making a compromise, I’m not showing you grace, because I feel like if you’re gonna cheat once, you’re gonna cheat again. And so I want to draw a line in the sand here. But also, I’ve told you all one of my weaknesses is not showing gray. So I’m not saying I’m right in this math and could be doing this a lot better than me, I don’t know, I’m just saying for my personality. That’s how I handle it. And you got to do what you can sleep with at night. But I think some really good universal advice that Madison offered was, he said, never directly accused a student of cheating, or, you know, say that to a parent, you got to avoid the wrath of that. And so he had some great language like saying things whether that’s in an email or with a student, hey, some suspicious things occurred here. And I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it. And I think this is especially important because we need to help parents who may not see it as a big deal, or who are just trying to get you to give their students grace and say, Hey, here’s the thing, I’m bringing you in on this, not sure what went down. But I felt like there was this suspicious things happening, a lot of papers looking the exact same or, you know, we had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the test. And then we came back like things were looking shady. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of it. And I want to talk to you about this. Because if your student was a part of this, wouldn’t you rather they learn this hard lesson now, with the repercussions of cheating or suspicious activity, you know, because I don’t want to necessarily call it cheating, then just let this slide and then they realize they got away with it. And then that empowers them. And then this continues happening. Again, when they’re in college or in their job or with a partner in a relationship and the consequences are a lot graver I know people hate this phrase, but it’s a slippery slope. Like if you cheat on one thing it and you get away with it, it creates, I swear it creates neurological pathways that make you feel like it’s okay, and you can do it again. And like I said, ultimately, this is a character issue, this is an integrity issue. So if it’s in their character to cheat, and we don’t address it, and treat it seriously, they’re going to do it again. So my best advice for how to deal with it, I think having some sort of policy for how you’re gonna handle this, that could be a school policy, it can be a department wide policy, to having something and knowing that you have people that will have your back, whether that’s your department chair, or your vice principal, or your head principal, instructional coach, whoever someone’s going to have your back on this and you know ahead of time, what do I do if this occurs? Now, also, if it actually happens, you can go ahead and get their opinion before you address a student or parent about it. And again, we’re not going to call say anyone’s cheated, unless we’re 1,000% Sure, we’re just gonna say suspicious things have happened. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it and see if you were a part of it, and then go from there. Personally, I really liked my school’s policies in the past, which were always zero for the grade and then you know, you can kind of make some deals like if it’s a test that you don’t they got a zero that’s going to wreck their grade, but you can make a deal and say, Hey, If your midterm grade can replace, you know, your lowest test grade or something, and you can offer that to everybody, and so then that could replace a zero or something. So it totally doesn’t bottom out, you can kind of be creative with the repercussions. But I do think there needs to be repercussions. So all that to say, get some people on your team, get admin on board, seek counsel on this, I just don’t think anyone should be handling a cheating situation on their own. But hopefully, if you follow some of the other advice at the top of the episode, you’re gonna prevent a lot of like, kind of like the petty cheating issues, which then kind of just narrows down and cheating on big things like projects and tests. And then those will be handled, you know, with more of like a team of people. Now, something I mentioned earlier that I feel like I need to bring up again, as labs. And I know, it’s kind of hard to grade with labs, because you’re like, well, if they do it in a lab group, like, of course, they’re gonna have the same stuff. So here’s what I would say on that you have a couple of ways you can handle this one, you can just collect one paper per lab group. So don’t even collect for like, just collect one period accounts for everyone. The second thing you can do when you grade Labs is only grade like the analysis section and tell the log groups, your analysis should be written uniquely, period. If there’s you know, more than 50% of it is word for word like, I’m going to say you cheated, you know, I don’t know how you want to handle that it’s up to you. You can have them write do their lab write ups on a Google Doc. And you can kind of see every single person who’s typed into it and what they’ve typed and what their contribution was. So there are ways you can get around that with labs, if that’s a concern of yours with them copying that, but we’ll talk more about grading labs. Also, in a future episode, I think that’s going to be episode 97. So stay tuned for that. Now, the last advice I want to leave you is going to be specifically for those of you who might own some of my It’s not rocket science resources, my units, my full year curriculum, or maybe you’ve thought about buying them in the past, but you’re hesitant, because you’re like, I don’t want to purchase resources online, because my students will go on and potentially, you know, buy the units via the curriculum to get the answer keys. So here’s the thing I always like to preface with, unfortunately, this is the case, if you’re using any resources you do not create entirely from scratch yourself. So if you get anything, even for free from another teacher, they could have gotten that from a different teacher answer keys floating around online on Google, you find something on Google than the broad find the answer key on Google. Even if you’re using textbook resources, kids can get on right now and buy a teacher version of any textbook on Amazon, eBay, or 1000s of online used bookstores. So just like they can buy a unit off TBT they can buy textbook resources off the internet. So not trying to make you feel depressed. But just saying it’s a universal problem. Unless you’re willing to write every single thing from scratch, that’s going to be an issue that you have to address. Now. I have spent so much of my life, trying to figure out the best way to prevent this. I mean, I have sent hundreds of messages to TBT trying to brainstorm like how can we prevent students from getting on and like buying keys and things like that. I’ve also now that I sell on my own website, I’ve done some research to try to figure out what I can do on the back end. And unfortunately, there’s basically nothing because they can pretty much get around anything. And the fact that they can, you know, use their parents credit cards. So many of these students even have their own credit cards, like 15 year olds have their own credit cards. It’s insane to me, but they have them now. So like, there’s no way that I can really get around that I have literally talked to web developers trying to figure out what can I do to safeguard this and there’s no way I can prove their identity when they sign up. So the alternative would be, well, why don’t you just remove the answer keys, which I have also thought about doing. But the thing is, I wrote It’s not rocket science resources originally to serve new teachers, teachers new to a subject. So like the chemistry teacher who’s taught chemistry for 25 years, and now has a section of anatomy and is like, what do I do, and also teachers who have multiple preps or going on maternity leave and just need one of them off of their plate. And so that is the lens with which I write all my curricula. And I want to serve those teachers. And those teachers tend to be teachers that desperately need the answer keys because it’s a new topic, or it’s something they don’t know, or they don’t have time to make use, because they have 16 preps or whatever. Y’all have the craziest schedules. So I need to answer keys in there to support those teachers, because that is my first priority. I thought about a vetting system where you know, you can buy a unit and buy curricula and there’s no answer keys in it. And then you have to fill out like a Google form and apply to get access to the answer keys. But I’ve talked with several other curriculum writers who have done this and they’ve said it’s a literal nightmare. Leaving y’all I don’t know if you’re on my email list or if you follow me on Instagram, I talked about this on my Instagram for a while, and I had hundreds of you DM me, because I was like okay, maybe I’ll have people like scan in their teacher ID or you know, show me where they are on the school website to show their and educators show me your educator, email. And so many of you all came back with exceptions. Well, our student IDs look the same as teachers. We don’t have a teacher photo ID. We don’t have our names on the website for privacy matters. Our email addresses look the same as students, like, y’all had so many things. One of you even told me how a student like literally stole your ID once and used it to get answer keys or something. And it was like the craziest story. So all that to say, it was like, okay, am I going to add in this is going to be come my part time job to police this and then not even build a police it and then it also excludes all the homeschool teachers or teachers, you know, who are really small schools that don’t have any sort of this kind of like proof, a lot of you don’t have teaching certificates, because you’ve come into this as a second year. So you don’t even have that to show us proof. It just was crazy. And then of course, some of you are like, I know, for a fact my students can make a Canva template that makes it look like they have an ID or they can make a fake website, like, again, back to the start of the episode cheaters gonna cheat. So no matter what I do, it’s going to be a problem. And so I have to control things that I actually can control. And that’s something I can’t control. So here are a couple things I’ve done to protect It’s not rocket science resources and protect the integrity of the resources for your use in the classroom. And at least to again, provide more preventative barriers. First and foremost, I don’t sell on purpose, I do not sell the majority of my risk resources, ala carte, or individually. I have teachers all the time asked me, Well, you just sell the test will you just sell you know this or this or that. And I tend to not sell that I sell them within a unit, that’s a minimum, typically a $50, or the full year curriculum. So at least, they’re not getting a cheat on this test for $3 tests that they bought in TBT, they’re gonna spend at least $50 and have access to your credit card to get it. So that eliminates some people off the top of it of the list that are going to try to cheat this way. The second thing is I have made my copyright info. This is something I changed from when I started writing curriculum, but I’ve made it as small and as inconspicuous as I can on the pages. It’s in gray, it’s super light, it’s really tiny. When you print, you can barely see it. Now I’ve had someone else before if I can just erase it altogether, I cannot. If I erase my copyright information, I then forfeit all rights to the copyright if someone finds my work and attempts to claim it as their own. So legally, I have truly spent time and money talking to an IP attorney about this, I cannot remove my copyright unless I want to forfeit my rights to my own copy, which is my livelihood. So I cannot do that. But you can manually wipe it out by hand before you make copies of the packet for your students or digitally before sharing the packets, you can insert a little white square shape just like you would in PowerPoint on the sides and covered on every page, you can do that it’ll blend in the background and students are not going to notice it unless they zoom in and try to move the box. Okay, so there are ways that you can blot that out if you’d like. Third thing I’ve done is on my YouTube channel, which I know a lot of you use with your students to watch the lecture videos. I don’t put links to anything of mine there promotionally, it would probably be better for me if I did, I’d link to the unit or whatever. And then maybe more teachers would find it. And by that I don’t do it to try to again make it easier for students to find me. Yes, of course they can. Google is not rocket science resources. But again, it’s not a direct link. So it’s going to make it a little bit more challenging for them. The fourth thing I’ve done and this is the largest investment of my resources towards this is the very first person I ever hired to help me with it’s not rocket science was my legal assistant. And she’s still with me today. She has worked with me the last five years. I hired her because I’ve had issues in the past when I taught AP Biology, I use a lot of textbook resources and College Board materials. And the answer keys were all over the internet. You know, sometimes it’s students getting a hold of them putting them up. Sometimes it’s teachers literally posting them on their class website for their students like check their own work, not realizing everyone on the internet can see it. Or they posted in a shared drive in their district. Someone else grabbed it and posted on the internet. So needless to say, this was such a headache for me as an AP biology teacher, using College Board resources that I started paying her to spend several hours a week searching for my answer keys that may be posted on the internet. So the good news is it will be much harder and nearly impossible that she’s so good at her job for students who teachers uses our science resources to find answers anywhere to my resources for free, because she is scouring the internet every week to get them removed. And the nice thing too is like if some pop up, if you see them, you can send me a direct link and she can usually get it down in 24 hours. So even this comes to like kids making quizlets and then maybe you want your students to make a Quizlet and it has all the right answers. You know, we can get those down too. So that has been an investment I have made on Paul’s behalf and I do think that helps make a difference. So at a minimum or preventing students from cheating for free in that instance, with my legal assistant all that she does. Now the thing I’ve done for as architects resources is I have tried to include very minimal answers when you get to the labs and of course the projects on those answers. Keys, I’ve tried to leave them open ended. Obviously all the practice handouts and stuff have answers to support you. But the labs and stuff don’t. And so if you follow my advice at the top of this episode, and you’re only going to grade labs and projects for accuracy, then a student who purchases a unit to get the answer keys is out of luck, because like, okay, they got the answer keys that practice that does nothing for them, because you’re going to do the practice in class, you’re not going to grade it, or you’re just going to grade it for completion, so it won’t matter. So that will hopefully help to sixth thing is all quizzes and tests are in an editable format. So not all my resources are editable, but quizzes and tests, always hours, you can easily tweak the multiple choice or even just change out the numbers for quantitative problems. And with minimal effort, you tweak to the test enough that you can catch cheaters who have bought it and are using the answer keys and trying to copy in there. So you can just read that writing and test or quiz from scratch takes so long. So you’re still getting a lot of value by having those included for you. And now all you have to do is change a couple things here and there, boom, you are done. And then the seventh thing I’ve done to support It’s not rocket science resource users, is how I’ve written the test in general yield, the test questions are not surprises, you could honestly make all of your tests open note to kind of eliminate that barrier of cheating and make it an even playing field for everyone, if you wanted to test questions, especially for honors students are written to be application really, anyway, you know, the CP tests obviously have more matching and more lower level like Bloom’s Taxonomy, vocabulary type questions, but the honors especially like, yeah, they can have their notes. But if they don’t know how to actually do this, the skills that we’ve been taught, then they won’t be successful on the test anyway. So I want to encourage you with that, too, like, even if they bought it, and they get the answer key, okay,

Rebecca 26:49
like, are you going to memorize all of it, I mean, that would be pretty hard. But even if you do, it’s still going to be a challenge for you. So hopefully, that encourages you all that to say, I clearly have a lot to say about cheating, because I got so fired up about it. But here’s my action set for you today, I want you to get with your department or with your admin and come up with a universal strategy you guys can stack hands on for handling suspicious activity in your classroom. Okay, have a group gameplan so you are not alone in this. I don’t want you to ever be alone in this. And I hope this encourages you whether you use isn’t rocket science resources are not that we’re doing the best we can to support you in this with the what we have and what I have in my personal capacity to help you with this. And hopefully we can be preventative in other ways that it doesn’t even matter whether you’re using resources you made or not, because you’re only going to be grading certain things anyway. And so hopefully that’ll help eliminate some of the desire or pressure that these students feel in order to need to cheat. All right, that’s it. You can find anything I’ve mentioned or reference or little summary about this episode in the show notes at it’s not rocket science classroom.com/episode 94. And for today’s review, let’s see if someone who has caught someone red handed and says some suspicious activity wants to leave a rating and review for the podcast. I’d love to hear from you. And how this episode helped you and how much you’re enjoying the secondary science simplified podcast. And if not, if that’s not you, I’ll see you next week we’ll talk more about grading practices. All right, teacher friends. That wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you here next week. Until then, I’ll be reading free teacher friend