Online Cheating

Robert Ubell considers how serious a problem it is and what colleges should do about it.


Spooked by horror stories of an online cheating plague, how should university faculty members and administrators respond? Should they launch a virtual anti-cheating crusade, armed with high-tech surveillance, ending in disciplinary terror -- retribution, chastisement, and sanctions, marked by failing grades and expulsions? Or should they just throw up their hands in defeat, treating it as a chronic academic illness, no worse in our lecture halls and online than the lack of integrity found outside the campus gates, equally under siege by marriage infidelities, corporate malfeasance, and irresponsible politicians playing fast and loose with “alternative facts”?

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