Stay Tuned, Folks
As I was getting ready to put this week’s blog to bed, so to speak, the Saturday edition of my local rag, The Freeps, landed on my doorstep with the following headline on the front page:
‘Overwhelmingly clear’ students cheated on exam: Western professor
In my experience that’s a pretty common occurrence in university exams, so why the big headline? Well, said professor is refusing to use the results of the final exam in his class in calculating final marks, because he is sure that some high proportion of the students who wrote it cheated by using AI.
Interestingly, it is a class in health law, and the prof gave an online take-home exam which included instructions that no outside resources (no book, no notes, no AI) be used. A brave – or maybe foolhardy – move by the prof. I should say that back during Covid lockouts I gave a few exams that way, and it worked pretty well. The students have to upload their answers within a certain time limit after downloading the questions themselves. The time limit meant that if they tried to go back and use their notes to come up with answers to my questions, they were doomed anyway, and there were no AI chatbots back then. The marks on my exams given in this way were not much different than on exams given in-person.
I regard this as a developing story, which I will continue to follow, as I am very interested in a) what UWO does about this, and b) whether the Freeps stays on it.
For now, let me note what the university spokesperson said to the Freeps:
Western University provided a statement from Alison Springate, director of stakeholder relations for Western communications, in response to questions from The Free Press about the exam and Shelley’s response to it.
“Academic integrity is the cornerstone of Western University,” she said.
I will take the writer’s prerogative here to interject – ‘Oh, horseshit, Alison.’
“To protect the integrity of our investigation process, and the privacy of students, we do not confirm if an investigation into suspected or actual individual scholastic offences is taking place.”
More horseshit. What that signals is that UWO will try to keep all of this as quiet as possible, so they can find a way to weasel out of punishing any students. That the prof, one Jacob Shelley, has apparently already gone public on this has the Powers at UWO in quite a state, I’m sure, which is why I will follow this. They are going to do their utmost to put a lid on this and on Shelley, and quickly. That quote above is them preparing the ground to impose radio silence on this whole affair.
To his great credit, Shelley sent an email to his entire class of 288 students explaining what he was doing, and has resisted the UWO bosses suggestion that he try to sort out who cheated and who did not, and mark accordingly. Good for him. He says that he is not at all confident he could identify every student that cheated, and he has no wish to let those he misses get high marks on the basis of that cheating. In any case, if he did what the bosses want, all the students who were fingered would appeal to the minions of those bosses and in the end not be punished in any significant way. That is a movie I saw many times during my career. UWO in the 21st century hates punishing cheaters.
Some last words from Prof Shelley, from the Freeps article:
Shelley said his big concern is that Western doesn’t have adequate policies to prevent cheating.
“There is no real attempt to address this – we’re not doing anything about it. We’re accepting it,” he said. “We’re wilfully blind to it.”
Shelley also said this year he saw the poorest attendance in his classroom he has ever seen.
“Students are just not coming to class . . . in my class of 288, one week I had 104 (attend),” he said.
As I said, stay tuned, folks.