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Posts Tagged ‘Cheating’

Black-Market Study Notes in Korea

We recently got an e-mail from a reader we’ll call C.:

I’m a professor at an English-language liberal arts college in Seoul, South Korea, where I teach Greco-Roman classics in translation. Compared to most any American school, the academic climate here is hyper-competitive, and my Korean students are studying machines who will do whatever it takes to get good marks. If you’re familiar with the insanity of Korean education, those are my students, the ones who’ve spent years in private tutoring academies 6 days a week, doing nothing but preparing for our admissions exam.

I just learned through the grapevine that some students who took my freshman core course on Western Civ. are selling their notes, study guides, and reconstructed versions of the exam. The prices they charge current freshmen vary, depending upon the grade the seller received from me. Students who did very well (A or A+) can charge $200 for their notes; students who received Bs can ask $120 to $150. Students with a B- or lower can’t find buyers.


The Cheater's High

A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (abstract; PDF) explores “the cheater’s high.” The authors are  Nicole Ruedy, Celia Moore, Francesca Gino, and Maurice E. Schweitzer. Here’s the abstract:

Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. In this article, we challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a “cheater’s high.” Across 6 studies, we find that even though individuals predict they will feel guilty and have increased levels of negative affect after engaging in unethical behavior (Studies 1a and 1b), individuals who cheat on different problem-solving tasks consistently experience more positive affect than those who do not (Studies 2-5). We find that this heightened positive affect does not depend on self-selection (Studies 3 and 4), and it is not due to the accrual of undeserved financial rewards (Study 4). Cheating is associated with feelings of self-satisfaction, and the boost in positive affect from cheating persists even when prospects for self-deception about unethical behavior are reduced (Study 5). Our results have important implications for models of ethical decision making, moral behavior, and self-regulatory theory.


Should We Stop Children From Learning to Cheat?

A Freakonomics Radio listener named Sandra Elsen writes:

Today, I went to my son’s kindergarten.  He attends the local International School (what the Realtor described as the “Hippy-Dippy” school, lol), in a semi-rural area, just outside of the city in a middle-class town.

There, I was asked to help them learn a new game. The concept was simple:  a six-sided block had three 1’s and three 2’s marked on each side.  They had to trace the number that was rolled on their worksheet.  Roll, trace.  Once five of one number was achieved, either the firetruck or the firefighter (pictured at the bottom of the sheet) “won.”  The teacher indicated it was a “race” to see which picture would win.


Black-Market Tour Guides at Disney World

The Week (and, earlier, the N.Y. Post) reports a new way for high-wage people to economize on time: when visiting Disney World, hire a “tour concierge” — a disabled person who uses his/her disability privileges to ignore waiting lines (and take the high-wage person and family with him/her ahead of the crowd).  At $130 per hour, the time saving is easily justified economically (just think of the lines at Space Mountain, or at my personal favorite, Small World).  It would be nice too if people would rent me their toddlers to board Southwest Airlines flights ahead of the mob.  Clearly, there is room for beneficial exchange like this in many areas.

These are not, however, Pareto improvements: while the “concierge” and his/her customers gain, everybody else in line loses. It doesn’t seem fair to me, and perhaps not efficient, since the externalities of extra waiting time for the whole line can be substantial.


What Suckers We Are

For years, we’ve been giving away free autographed bookplates that readers can stick in their copies of our books. (We’ve taken a break from this practice recently but will resume when we publish our next book.) I would estimate that we’ve mailed out between 20,000 and 30,000 bookplates — all of them really signed by the two of us and all absolutely free, including postage. Why did we do this? It just seemed like a good idea, and a nice way to thank people for reading.

But what suckers we are! As a reader named TL recently let us know, there’s good money to be made on eBay selling signed Freakonomics bookplates.


Would You Help Your Kids Cheat to Get a Driver's License?

A reader named Ari writes from Israel:

Recently the Israel Government voted to change the minimum age for getting a driver’s license. Here is a snippet from an article in Ha’aretz (headlined “Israel to Lower Driving Age, but Tack on Period of Mandatory Supervision”):
 
The earliest age to start driving lessons will remain 16 and a half. The period of driving accompanied by an adult will have to cover at least 50 hours, 20 of them on urban streets, 15 hours on inter-urban roads and 15 hours of driving at night. The novice driver will have to have an adult chaperone at all hours of the day during the first three months but only at night during the second three months. After the novice driver and the accompanying person sign a declaration that the accompanied driving requirement has been fulfilled properly, the new driver will be given a young driver’s license.
 
I’m curious as to how the honor system is going to work here. If my child’s license were to depend on my declaration, what are the chances that I would fudge? How would the governing agency know? It seems to be unverifiable. I assume that there will be some internet-based form with a checkbox and maybe some number to fill in (number of hours driven night / day / rain / …) I believe that forcing a person to write his own declaration would make it more difficult for him to lie.


Why Doesn't the Government Fix Sporting Events?

This blog has clever readers. One of them, Corey Forbes, writes in to say:

We know that point shaving, game throwing, match fixing and referee scandals have existed in professional and college sports since as long ago as the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Knowing this, why doesn’t the U.S. Government just fix a sporting event(s) to pay off its debts … or are they doing this already?

I love the “or are they doing this already?”

Anyway: why not indeed (other than the potential p.r. and financial disasters)?


Wall Street Cheating

A new survey of 500 financial service professionals in the U.S. and the U.K. finds that 26 percent of survey respondents “had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace” and almost 25 percent “believed that financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct in order to be successful.”  

Depending on your worldview, you may read that previous paragraph and think, Oh my goodness, that’s outrageous! Or, conversely, you might think Only 26 percent?!


How to Cheat in Online Courses

An article in Chronicle of Higher Education explains how the increase in online courses has made cheating a lot easier. For example, Bob Smith (not his real name) successfully arranged a test-cheating scheme with several friends.  The tests “pulled questions at random from a bank of possibilities” and could be taken anywhere, but had to be taken within a short window of time each week:

Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice, with the two results averaged into a final score.

“So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but we’re all guaranteed an A in the end,” Mr. Smith told me. “We’re playing the system, and we’re playing the system pretty well.”


Cutting Class, With the School's Help

Via the Globe & Mail: it used to be that when you wanted to cut class, you’d have to get a friend to sign you into class, or you’d have to beat your parents home to delete any incriminating messages on the answering machine. But those methods are bush league compared to a recent California initiative. United Press International reports that 50 high school students were caught colluding with a school administrator in an attendance scam:


Cheating for Charity

New research indicates that people may be more likely to lie when a charity benefits from their dishonesty. A group of researchers led by Alan Lewis at University of Bath investigated this in their paper “Drawing the line somewhere: An experimental study of moral compromise” (ungated here). From the paper’s abstract: 

In a study by Shalvi, Dana, Handgraaf, and De Dreu (2011) it was convincingly demonstrated that psychologically, the distinction between right and wrong is not discrete, rather it is a continuous distribution of relative ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’. Using the ‘die-under-the-cup’ paradigm participants over-reported high numbers on the roll of a die when there were financial incentives to do so and no chance of detection for lying. Participants generally did not maximise income, instead making moral compromises.


What to Do With Cheating Students?

I’m nearly certain that a pair of students cheated on my final exam—the probability they had so many identical answers on the multiple-choice exam is infinitesimal. If I pursue them, it takes me time, and there’s no assurance they will be found guilty. If I don’t, I’ll feel badly about giving them an undeserved grade. Even for fairly risk-averse students, cheating seems like a good idea. I doubt that most cheating is caught; and unless the penalty is very severe (expulsion) and/or the students’ costs of contesting the accusation are high, and both are very well-publicized, the incentive to cheat for students with weak consciences seems overpowering. To salve my own conscience I’ll report them, although it’s probably a waste of my time; but I doubt that reporting them will deter their future cheating or deter others very much.


More Odd News from the World of Sumo Wrestling

One of the few international topics covered in the original Freakonomics was the chapter describing how sumo wrestlers collude to throw matches. Over the years, the sport has provided plenty of odd fodder for the blog. By that measure, the latest bizarre scandal that’s shaking the sumo world does not disappoint.

On Oct. 29, news broke that a top “sumo elder” was under investigation for abusing former apprentices. Details from The Japan Times:

Japan Sumo Association chief Hanaregoma has launched an investigation into allegations by a weekly magazine that sumo elder Naruto once beat a former apprentice with a block of wood and injected Czech-born wrestler Takanoyama with insulin in an attempt to increase his appetite so he could bulk up.

The article claims Naruto beat the apprentice wrestler with a block of wood if the taste of the protein-loaded “chankonabe” hot pot was not to his satisfaction. It also said he hit former sekiwake Wakanosato over the head with a shovel and injected Takanoyama with insulin to increase his appetite during the year before last, when he was in the third-tier makushita division.


Massive Teacher Cheating Scandal Erupts in Atlanta

An investigation into Atlanta’s public school system has uncovered evidence that teachers and principals have been secretly erasing and correcting answers on students’ tests for as long as a decade. A state investigation found that 178 educators at 44 of the district’s 56 schools engaged in cheating. The report is a huge blow to an urban school district that for years was hailed as one of the country’s most successful due to increased student performance.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.
The report accuses top district officials of wrongdoing that could lead to criminal charges in some cases.


Have D.C.'s "Best Schools" Been Cheating?

A handful of Washington D.C. schools are embroiled in a scandal over whether teachers corrected wrong answers to boost students’ test scores, and thereby, increase their bonuses.


Eyeballing the Forbidden Fruit

Ordering your significant other to ignore the attractive person at the next table might backfire, according to a new study.


Cracking the Lottery Code

In Wired, Jonah Lehrer profiles Mohan Srivastava, a Toronto statistician who seemingly cracked the scratch-lottery ticket code. “The tic-tac-toe lottery was seriously flawed,” writes Lehrer. “It took a few hours of studying his tickets and some statistical sleuthing, but he discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off-the ticket could be cracked if you knew the secret code.”


Sumo: More of the Same

I can’t say that I am surprised by the latest sumo headline from the Associated Press.


Those Cheating Teachers! A New Freakonomics Marketplace Podcast

This year alone has seen teacher-cheating scandals in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere; in this week’s Times, Sharon Otterman reports how New York State is trying to curtail cheating and offers some specific instances of past cheating:

A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was “tricky,” and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.

This comes as little surprise to Steve Levitt, who several years ago recognized what most legislators and school administrators were unable (or unwilling?) to foresee: that the introduction of high-stakes testing would create incentives that might encourage some teachers (especially bad ones) to cheat on behalf of their students. So he developed an algorithm to catch cheaters, which was so successful that then-Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan brought Levitt in to help identify and fire cheating Chicago teachers.


The Ghostwriter

Have you ever wondered just who writes those papers handed in by cheating students? An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, written by a writer for a “custom-essay company,” has some answers for you.


Cheating the Subway

A few years ago, I hurried to catch a Berlin subway and forgot to buy the $2.10 ticket. Usually nobody checks tickets, although every once in awhile checkers pass through the subway-which they did on that trip! I paid an instant cash fine of $40 and was completely embarrassed and chagrined.


Doping in the Tour de France

Why does Levitt find Landis’s allegations so compelling? He describes in great specificity and detail scenarios involving refrigerators hidden in closets, and the precise temperature at which the blood stored in those refrigerators had to be kept; and faked bus breakdowns during which Lance received blood transfusions while lying on the floor of the bus, etc. To make up stories of this kind, with that sort of detail, strikes Levitt as a difficult task.


The Truth About College Plagiarism

Despite all the concern over increased plagiarism in the Internet age, concrete figures on the trend are hard to come by. In a new working paper, Brian Jacob (an occasional Levitt co-author) and Thomas Dee conducted a natural field experiment at a “selective post-secondary institution” to shed light on the determinants of student plagiarism.


Fish Gotta Swim, Teachers Gotta Cheat?

Remember the story about the cheating schoolteachers in Chicago? The theory was that high-stakes testing, by putting more pressure on students to pass, creates a stronger incentive for teachers to not leave those students behind – and that a fraction of those teachers, generally the worse ones, went so far as to cheat on behalf of their students.
Looks like it may have been happening in Springfield, Mass., too.


Cheating for a $20

Each year in my 500-student principles class I gather a group of eight students and tell them that I will auction a $20 bill to the highest bidder. If two or more students bid the same thing, the difference between $20 and their joint bid will be divided among the winning bidders. They can collude to fix the price just like oligopolists who violate antitrust laws, but they must mark down their bids in secret.


Apparently I've Ruined Economics (Again)

A few years back, the New Republic accused me of ruining economics.
Now The Economist magazine, in a much more subtle way, makes the same implication. Here’s the second sentence of an article entitled “What Went Wrong With Economics”:


The Latest Entry Into the Cheating Hall of Fame

If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.


Let's Talk About Tax Cheating: A Freakonomics Quorum

Photo: hoggardb The Internal Revenue Service presumably never likes tax cheats, but when money is tight there is more pressure put on the I.R.S. to step up enforcement and collect more money. The most recent gambit, reported today, is an amnesty program designed to root out offshore tax havens. We once wrote of another I.R.S. measure that produced $3 billion . . .


The Counterfeit Paper Trade

| Why write a college term paper when you can pay $20 for someone in Nigeria, Ukraine, or — well, O.K., Texas to do it for you? The Chronicle of Higher Education took a look at a leading essay mill with international ties. Says one writer-for-hire: “I took [an assignment] on Christological topics in the second and third centuries. I . . .