AN HONEST EFFORT: Even when students can easily view answers to online homework assignments, they’ll try their hand before taking a peek, according to research from the American Society for Engineering Education. Researchers studied how 533 students in an introductory programming course submitted answers to short coding exercises using digital textbook platform zyBooks. About 1 percent of students cheated the system by looking at correct answers before submitting their own.
“We believe most students really want to learn, so most would not cheat a learning system if it is well designed,” Alex Daniel Edgcomb, one of the researchers, tells Inside Higher Ed. “But of course we wanted confirmation of that belief. And we had several instructors bring up the question, so we wanted to confidently be able to answer them as well.” Prior research shows that cheating isn’t necessarily more prevalent online than it is in in-person classes.
