According to recent research conducted by the Harvard Business School and reported on by Ed Yong of Discover magazine, cheaters don’t just trick their teachers — they deceive themselves without even realizing it.
Harvard doctoral candidate Zoe Chance gave 76 students a short math test and attached an answer key to half of the class’ exams. After the exam, subjects were asked to predict their score on a hypothetical second test. Even though the subjects who received answer keys on the first test were explicitly informed they would not receive a key the second time, they were overall far more confident than their answerless counterparts.
The average predicted test score of a student with access to an answer key was 82 percent compared to the predicted score of 72 percent found in the control group. When the two groups were actually given a second test without answer keys, there was no significant difference between the scores of the two groups, pointing to the answer keys and an overestimation of personal ability as the cause of the difference in predictions.
Chance has also shown that some personalities are more readily self-deceived than others. After the first test, Chance measured the ability of subjects to persuade themselves with a questionnaire, and found subjects who she ranked as “high self deceivers” were more likely to overestimate their abilities than their average contemporaries.
Obviously, these results apply to students who actually cheat on tests to pass classes, but how many students at the University are victims of this brand of self-deception?
If Chance’s first test was relabeled homework, the answer key relabeled as Cramster.com, the popular textbook solutions website, and the second test an exam in a difficult class, these results could probably be generalized to a large portion of the student body. Students enrolled in challenging “weed out” courses in science and engineering would be particularly well represented.
In 2009, LSU was the fourth -best represented university on Cramster.com and Baton Rouge was the No. 6 city in the nation in website usage, according to The Daily Reveille.
The website is intended to be used by students to supplement their learning and help with homework, but in classes where homework is graded for correctness and not just completion, students faced with the prospect of up to several hours of homework in multiple classes are sure to abuse Cramster at least occasionally.
Chance’s research suggests students who have access to homework solutions may actually do their understanding of the material more harm than students who don’t even bother to attempt their assignments.
Copying homework solutions from the Internet (a breach of the College of Engineering’s Code of Student Conduct) will improve students’ grades in the short term, but their overall grade, based primarily on tests, will likely suffer for it.
Cramster and other solutions manuals can have beneficial effects on student understanding, but only if they are utilized responsibly. Fighting through a difficult problem set definitely can teach a student a lot, but in some cases looking at a solutions manual can help students past stumbling blocks and increase their overall understanding of the material.
Some teachers have reduced the importance of homework grades in determining final grades, or abolished homework grades entirely because of the popularity of resources like Cramster, reducing the immediate incentive of students to do the homework.
While this approach will probably result in fewer students completing assignments, looking at the results of Chance’s research, the students only doing homework for the grade might be better off without copying solutions, receiving perfect homework grades and deceiving themselves.
Andrew Shockey is a 20-year-old biological engineering sophomore from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Ashockey.
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contact Andrew Shockey at [email protected]
Shockingly Simple: Students should be wary of self-deception, Cramster
March 22, 2011