Oklahoma Watch: Students find shortcuts, cheats as virtual schooling drags on in pandemic Be the first to know

Computer programmer Gradyn Wursten still updates a project he created to hack his high school homework.

As a sophomore, he wrote code that adds shortcuts to Edgenuity — an online education platform that delivers the same content to 3 million U.S. students. Wursten's program, developed from his home in Utah, has been downloaded 40,000 times. In the past month, he gained 2,000 new users, including more than 100 in Oklahoma.

Once installed, his program can skip videos and automatically fill practice questions with answers. Instead of watching a 30-minute lesson, a user can cut right to the quiz. And those answers are often easily found on the web.

And his tool is just one of many. Entire test keys and quiz answers are posted to homework-help websites. Smartphone apps use a photo of a question to produce an answer. Students connect on social media or text groups to share answers. There are even tricks to fake attendance in a Zoom class.

The shift to virtual education amid COVID-19 is challenging the system of determining what students actually know and limiting educators’ ability to ensure academic integrity.

“Everything my kids are doing at home is a cheatable assignment, which makes that in-class time so incredibly valuable,” said Elanna Dobbs, who teaches English at Edmond Memorial High School.

Edmond is using a blended schedule, where students attend class some days and are virtual from home the rest of the week. Many students aren’t getting any in-person class time, though.

Technology provides some cheating protections. Edgenuity features a locking browser, which restricts students from opening other tabs and programs while the learning platform is open. Epic Charter Schools and Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy say their teachers can require exams to be proctored, where the student is monitored remotely through a webcam.

Students can bypass these protections. Often, it’s no more difficult than pulling up answers on a smartphone. Even kindergartners know how to ask a smart speaker their homework questions.

Yet the companies providing the lessons say it’s up to users to provide the accountability and prevent cheating.

“Edgenuity trusts the integrity of teachers, administrations, and even students themselves, to ensure that students learn and succeed fairly,” Edgenuity executive Deborah Rayow wrote in response to Oklahoma Watch’s questions.

Edgenuity, an Arizona-based company, is being used by at least some virtual students in Union, Sand Springs, Owasso and other school districts. Another program, Exact Path, is being used in more than 400 Oklahoma districts, including Tulsa Public Schools.

Exact Path, which adapts to individual students, makes it more challenging to use online social networks to find answers. And the company works with popular homework help sites to ensure its content is not posted there.

One of the most effective things teachers can do to prevent cheating is to design their own online curriculum, or at least supplement the platform’s assignments with their own, said Derald Glover, assistant executive director of the Oklahoma Association of School Administrators.

Parent Nicole Wisel wishes her children’s school district, Cimarron Public Schools, would figure out an alternative to Edgenuity.

“We hate it,” she said. “Our teachers are being paid to be proctors, and that’s it. They don’t even know what these kids are doing.”

The prerecorded video lessons are too long, she says, and one of her children, who is autistic, says the instructors in the videos are “creepy.”

Chuck Anglin, Cimarron Public Schools’ superintendent, said he likes to use Edgenuity to offer extra classes in a normal year. Choosing it for virtual learning this year was making “the best of a bad situation,” he said.

He agrees that when kids are learning from home, the onus to prevent cheating is mostly on parents.

“We are not programmed for distance learning,” said Anglin, whose school district is located 12 miles west of Enid.

Researchers at the National Education Policy Center found that students often look up answers — in a separate browser or on a smartphone — while taking assessments.

Katie Harris teaches senior English at Oklahoma Virtual Charter Academy, a statewide virtual school run by the national company K12, Inc. In her first year, students turned in a lot of plagiarized essays, she said. Now, she knows she has to rewrite her lessons, assignments, quizzes and tests every year.

“I say, ‘look, if I Google this exact writing prompt, I can find whole essays online. Don’t do that,’” she said.

K12 schools use their own virtual curriculum, not Edgenuity or Exact Path. A plagiarism detection service, Turnitin, automatically scans students’ work.

At Epic Charter Schools, the state’s largest virtual school, families can choose from more than a dozen learning platforms, Edgenuity and Exact Path among them.

To prevent cheating, Epic teachers proctor students’ benchmarking tests — in person, if possible, or via video conference, said Shelly Hickman, a spokeswoman for Epic.

Continuum of cheating

Psychologists who study human behavior have found that most people will cheat — not a lot, but a little. Researcher Dan Ariely calls this the “fudge factor.”

Ariely, a professor at Duke University and author of the book “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty,” explains how and why cheating in online courses is easier than in a physical classroom.

He says the physical distance provided by online classes — distance from the teacher, the students, and the school building — creates a psychological distance that “allows people to further relax their moral standards.”

It’s also true that cheating exists on a continuum. Wursten, for instance, drew the line at graded content.

“I’ve found ways that I could automatically get the correct answers for things like tests and quizzes, but I did not actually write a tweak for it because I consider that cheating,” he said. “I don’t intend to actually make a cheat tool.”

Wursten, who graduated in 2019 and is now certified to work in IT, still adds features to his program — called Edgentweaks — as a “fun side project” and because he wants to help other students avoid the drudgery he once faced.

Meanwhile, Edgenuity works to patch his hacks in a virtual game of cat-and-mouse.

Some apps and websites created to assist students on their virtual learning path have been co-opted into cheat tools.

Brainly has a smartphone app that lets students scan homework or test questions, and answers pop up immediately. On Quizlet, another homework help website, entire test keys are posted and shared among students. The app Photomath produces not only the answer to a math problem, but also all the steps needed for students to show their work.

Brainly and Quizlet have policies against cheating, though the deterrence factor is small.

Mackenzie Snovel, who graduated from Owasso last year, said she found 90% of the answers for her senior English and history classes online — and even used Brainly to complete her final exam.

She said she didn’t see an issue with looking up answers because “they were classes I needed to graduate, and none of that information I will need in my career.”

Some of the academic integrity responsibility has fallen to IT departments. They block websites known to be used for cheating and help facilitate webcam-powered exam proctoring.

Union Public Schools, using Edgenuity for the 2,700 middle and high school students who chose virtual, has implemented several of these security measures; they affect only school-owned devices.

Gart Morris, the district’s executive director of instructional technology, said he believes the best tool to combat cheating is cementing student-teacher relationships.

“It’s always a challenge to get one step ahead. There’s thousands of them, and there’s not thousands of us,” Morris said. “You can look at technology in a way to try to prevent cheating, but nothing works as well as a good solid relationship between students and an adult.”

Whitney Bryan, Oklahoma Watch, contributed to this story.

Video: How to help your child with virtual learning

Gallery: How parents can monitor virtual learning

Give your kids a daily report card? Experts say parents should monitor virtual learning

Get organized

Set Goals

Monitor their progress.

Praise your child

Let them know they did a great job when they have — with genuine, specific or labeled praise. FIU suggests a way to express this: “I love how you stayed at the table and finished all your math assignments.”

Tweak goals and rewards.

As they respond to the DRC, they should be able to meet behavior targets more consistently, FIU’s center believes. When that happens, raise the bar. If you had built in three or fewer violations into the goal of following class rules, make it two or fewer next time. And so forth.. If you see your child is no longer motivated by a reward, change it to maintain their interest. Maybe pizza for dinner or getting Taylor Swift’s new album might be more enticing.

Be consistent.

Watch Now: How to help your child with virtual learning

jpalmer@oklahomawatch.org

About the series

This story is part of a collaboration with PBS series "Frontline," through its Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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