Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Nakull Gupta, Curtis G. Northcutt, Edward Cutrell, W. Thies
{"title":"Measuring and Maximizing the Effectiveness of Honor Codes in Online Courses","authors":"Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, Nakull Gupta, Curtis G. Northcutt, Edward Cutrell, W. Thies","doi":"10.1145/2724660.2728663","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"We measure the effectiveness of a traditional honor code at deterring cheating in an online examination, and we compare it to that of a stern warning. Through experimental evaluation in a 409-student online course, we find that a pre-task warning leads to a significant decrease in the rate of cheating while an honor code has a smaller (non-significant) effect. Unlike much prior work, we measure the rate of cheating directly and we do not rely on potentially inaccurate post-examination surveys. Our findings demonstrate that replacing traditional honor codes with warnings could be a simple and effective way to deter cheating in online courses.","PeriodicalId":20664,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"17","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2724660.2728663","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 17
Abstract
We measure the effectiveness of a traditional honor code at deterring cheating in an online examination, and we compare it to that of a stern warning. Through experimental evaluation in a 409-student online course, we find that a pre-task warning leads to a significant decrease in the rate of cheating while an honor code has a smaller (non-significant) effect. Unlike much prior work, we measure the rate of cheating directly and we do not rely on potentially inaccurate post-examination surveys. Our findings demonstrate that replacing traditional honor codes with warnings could be a simple and effective way to deter cheating in online courses.