Abolish Exams, You Cowards
Abolish Exams, You Cowards
On academic dishonesty, abolition, and punishment.
Here’s a question: Why do students cheat on exams?
I imagine that many instructors see cheating as inevitable; that a certain fraction of the population (perhaps even all of humanity) will simply always have the temptation to Do Evil™, and that a certain fraction of that population will necessarily fall victim to the devil’s call. It’s certainly an idea that maps well onto my country’s Christianity-rooted notions of sin and deception; it’s just human nature, baby, nothing you can do about it except punish those who do it.
To be sure, cheating on exams (or copy a peers’ homework assignment, or any manner of academic dishonesty) is wrong. But do people cheat merely because they “are evil in nature”, or are there other factors at play?
Let’s ask a slightly different question: Why do people steal from grocery stores? Depending on who you are, your gut reaction might be to say that people steal because of their nature. Stealing is wrong, and they know it’s wrong, but they do it anyway, so they are Bad.
But I’m an abolitionist. I know why people steal from grocery stores, and I know why students cheat on exams: a girl’s gotta eat.
I have abolished exams in my classroom and I’m never going back. In my entire teaching career I have only given one (1) exam, a midterm in the Fall of 2017 when I taught Unit Operations for the very first time. Ever since then, I have favored homework sets, check-in quizzes, in-class exercises, and other forms of feedback/assessment. Not only do students love this about my classes (less exams = less stress), but I genuinely feel as though students learn better.
There are several reasons why I abolished exams, but a major one is that having exams promotes academic dishonesty. As people living in a carceral state, we like to think of crimes/issues of morality as something spawned within individuals, rather than incidents that are promoted by systems. “Students cheat because they’re Bad Students”. And to be 1000% clear, academic dishonesty is unacceptable and unprofessional. But I can’t help but wonder if our course structures encourage environments where cheating is more likely.
After all, people don’t steal from grocery stores because they’re Inherently Evil (not necessarily). People steal from grocery stores because they need to eat food. Plain and simple. We can attribute bad actions to an individual, or we can choose to see the entire system around them that drove them to the point where they needed to do something “illegal” in order to survive. We can choose to see that we live in a world where people need money in order to survive, and sympathize with those who may not have money for any number of reasons. We can also advocate for a world without manufactured scarcity, where food (and housing, and health care, etc.) are treated as a human right, not a commodity.
Let’s make this “food-exams” connection even more clear.
“Cheating Lessons” is a book by James M. Lang which boldly asserts that cheating is not an issue of mere morality. Lang outlines four features of learning environments that incentivize students to commit academic dishonesty.
An emphasis on performance
Lang uses the metaphor of sports throughout the opening pages of his book on cheating.
…athletes are celebrated for their performance in a single contest (or a series of such contests), rather than for the dedication and commitment they put into the training process, or their charitable donations off the field, or any other features of their public personas. When nothing matters but that one shining moment, it should not come as a surprise that some athletes will choose to do whatever it takes to help them succeed in that moment…the more pressure you load onto a single performance the more you are inducing human beings to cheat. (Page 21)
When we give our students exams, we are testing their ability to perform within a short timespan with limited resources. We’re not evaluating how much they engaged with the material in class, how hard they worked outside of class to learn the material, the hours they spend making sure their homework sets are perfect, or any other aspect of learning. We just say, “run down that race track fast as you can and if you do good enough, you can collect your prize”.
High stakes riding on the outcomes
Let’s say you’re taking an exam worth 30% or more of your final grade. Getting a poor grade on the exam means having to put in double the effort next time around, while continuing to juggle all your other classes. Getting a poor grade in the class means not only feelings of shame, but potentially losing your standing as an honors student, losing a scholarship, not being accepted for a good job when you leave college, and maybe having to repeat a semester, all of which have potential economic consequences. In the era of massive student loan debt and a system that prioritizes “grades” above all else, failing even a single exam could cost you thousands of dollars.
In this sort of environment, of course students are going to “do what it takes” to succeed, even if it takes some rule-bending. Most students don’t cheat, but by creating a system that incentivizes “doing whatever it takes”, you’re tilting the floor of human behavior. You’re free to walk up the tilted floor, but at scale, more people will go tumbling down.
An extrinsic motivation for success
Over-focusing on grades has huge consequences for learning as well. I’ve heard first-hand from students that, with all the pressure that’s on them to “do well” in their courses, they care more about their final grade the content. To quote Lang again,
When an environment compels students to complete a difficult task with the promise of an extrinsic reward or the threat of punishment—rather than inspiring them with appeals to the intrinsic joy or beauty or utility of the task itself—that environment tends itself to cheating, since the learners or competitors see the task in question as simply an obstacle to get (or avoid) some external consequence. In other words, in an environment characterized by extrinsic motivation, the learners or competitors care about what happens after the performance rather than relishing or enjoying the performance itself. (Page 30)
As an educator, I believe it’s my moral imperative to fight against the notion that learning is how you “get things”, and foster an environment where we learn out of a sense of curiosity, wonder, and hope, with the goals of healing and transformation. Exams, and assigning letter grades in general, encourage the opposite of this.
A low expectation of success
When I was an undergraduate student, UConn had a course called Chemical Engineering Analysis. The course was notoriously difficult and operated on a structure where “Exam 1 / Exam 2 / Final” made up 65% of the final grade.
These exams were intentionally, obtusely difficult in such a way that the average scores could be anywhere from 20 to 60… out of 100.
Perhaps fans of the Dark Souls video game series might read this and think this had to do with some ludonarrative commentary about disempowerment, teaching us a lesson about failure and preparing us for life outside of college. To that kindly I say, “Fuck you! That class was traumatizing!”
Numerical grades are already an abstraction from what real learning looks like (how are we to qualify the difference between an 86/100 and an 87/100 in real, describable terms? how much better do I understand thermodynamics if I got a, 87 on an exam as opposed to an 86?), but this was another level. After decades of being told that we need a bare minimum of 70/100 to have an acceptable grasp of a subject, getting handed back a 25/100 was just defeating. Nobody in that class was motivated to learn by the end, we were resigned to receive a low grade and accept the consequences.
Luckily, the course grades were curved, and most of us made it out with a B or a C…
…
Wait, but that’s worse, somehow.
What was the point of all that suffering and making us question our qualifications, just to turn around and say we did a good job actually? Getting told that a low “score” was bad and then being told that it was fine actually only points our attention to the frivolousness of the whole practice of grading.
Lang has some solutions for the troubled reader of this Substack post, who is most likely asking “okay, so what do we do instead?” It’s a great book altogether, but one that stands out to me are short, frequent, low-stakes assessments (as opposed to “give me 30% of your grade in this 1.5-hour period”). If you’re the type to give three big exams in your course, indulge yourself in fantasy for a moment…
You pose a question about the reading to your class, and the student formulates an interesting response to the question, one that reflects his reading of the material but puts his own specific spin on it. Later that week, the student comes back to the same idea in a short answer response on the midterm exam. Still later in that semester, the student takes the idea a little further and uses it as the starting point for a major essay for the course. The first time the student spoke that idea aloud in class, it created a new connection for him. During the exam, the idea was more easily recalled in a written form because it had been discussed in class. The idea continued to hang around in the student’s head, ultimately forming the basis for further research and understanding in the essays the student prepared. (Page 127)
This form of teaching improves memory retention, engages students in curiosity, and reduces the risk of cheating. As an instructor, this is my dream!!
Most importantly, I think it’s important that we see cheating as a consequence of a system we perpetuate. We fight cheating not as an evangelical preacher fights “the devil”, an inevitable and pure evil, but through compassion. A systemic analysis and a restorative justice mindset can do us teachers a lot of good.
Buy “Cheating Lessons” in hardcover or read the whole thing on JSTOR. (Not sponsored, btw, I just love this book!)
Much love,
-Anna