Dartmouth Cheating Debacle: 3 Initial Observations

A Dartmouth medical student was halfway through a timed practice test for a high-stakes board exam last month when an e-mail flashed on her phone. She was startled to find a formal message on her medical school’s letterhead.

The e-mail accused her — and, she later learned, more than a dozen other students — of cheating by accessing online course materials while taking a test on a different software platform. The school said that it had electronic evidence of misconduct, and that she was invited to make a brief statement defending herself at a tribunal to be held over Zoom in a week.

“I sat there for a few minutes, just looking at it completely in shock,” said the student, who, like the other students who spoke for this story, maintains her innocence. “It was just like, ‘Here is this infallible data. You could face expulsion if it’s verified.’”

For the past month the cheating allegations have engulfed the medical school, a small, close-knit community on anIvy League campus in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley. At least nine of the accused say that they are innocent, and that Dartmouth doesn’t understand how its own software platforms work. Medical school officials say the situation is unfortunate but the ongoing investigation is necessary to preserve academic integrity.

At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth’s use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times.

At Dartmouth, the use of Canvas in the cheating investigation was unusual because the software was not designed as a forensic tool. Instead, professors post assignments on it, and students submit their homework through it. [snip]

Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, “automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user,” according to a school email that students made public.

You can view quiz logs to view the status of your student quizzes. This feature is designed to help you investigate problems that a student may have in the quiz and gain insight into your quiz questions. Quiz logs are not intended to validate academic integrity or identify cheating for a quiz.

A recent post made me realize this may not be common knowledge so I’m just throwing this out there as I can verify this as a TA myself: anyone who has instructor privileges on a canvas page (professors, TAs, etc) can easily see your activity levels on the canvas page. This includes dates, times, every link you click and when, etc. If it’s on their Canvas page, they can see it if given reason to look (for example, if you have an exam that is not open note but you go clicking around on canvas while taking the exam, or you have a canvas ate your homework scenario).

To add to by this, exam questions are time stamped with every time you look at a question, answer a question, flag a question, etc. I’ve caught a half dozen students cheating that way. It isn’t coincidence when a whole group is answering questions in synch…

Some accused students said Dartmouth had hamstrung their ability to defend themselves. They said they had less than 48 hours to respond to the charges, were not provided complete data logs for the exams, were advised to plead guilty though they denied cheating or were given just two minutes to make their case in online hearings, according to six of the students and a review of documents.

Five of the students declined to be named for fear of reprisals by Dartmouth.

Duane Compton, dean of the Geisel School, said in an interview that its methods for identifying possible cheating cases were fair and valid. Administrators investigated carefully, he said, and provided accused students with all the data on which the cheating charges were based. He denied that the student affairs office had advised those who said they had not cheated to plead guilty.

Geisel’s Committee on Student Performance and Conduct, a faculty group with student members that investigates academic integrity cases, then asked the school’s technology staff to audit Canvas activity during 18 remote exams that all first- and second-year students had taken during the academic year. The review looked at more than 3,000 exams since last fall.

The tech staff then developed a system to recognize online activity patterns that might signal cheating, said Sean McNamara, Dartmouth’s senior director of information security.

School officials said that their analysis, which they hired a legal consulting firm to validate, discounted automated activity and that accused students had been given all necessary data in their cases.

But at least two students told the committee in March that the audit had misinterpreted automated Canvas activity as human cheating. The committee dismissed the charges against them.

In another case, a professor notified the committee that the Canvas pages used as evidence contained no information related to the exam questions his student was accused of cheating on, according to an analysis submitted to the committee. The student has appealed.

“We take academic integrity very seriously,” he said. “We wouldn’t want people to be able to be eligible for a medical license without really having the appropriate training.”