The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-10)

B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 10 , 2020

education

Preservation Office and the City Council to officially name the alley behind h er house. She has also established a f oundation t o build a n ational monument to the women w ho worked on the home front d uring World War II. Raya took several Advanced Placement classes online. She paid for her ACT math prep course herself. “ We t old her that if she improved h er score by X number of points, we’d p ay h er back,” her mother s aid. “She did not get paid b ack.” Like many other students w ho graduated from high school this year, Raya may take a gap year before going to college. She has, after all, b een a self-starting a dult long before she turned 1 8. Her parents are happy they went the home-schooling route. It must be said they are also relieved they will never have to do it again. [email protected]

mini six-week poetry class,” Marnie recalled. Raya’s parents had two great advantages: enough money to pay the teachers and a bright daughter with deep interests that would take her far no matter what happened in school. Raya danced four or five times a week. She was part of a professional teen improv troupe. She played piano. S he took horse-riding lessons. She volunteered weekly at a n assisted-living home. The richness of her extracurricular life was one reason s he and her parents thought attending the l ocal public s chool would h ave been a waste of precious time. When Raya was 11, s he decided to forgo some home-schooling classes to work with her Ward 2 council member, the Peabody Room of the Georgetown Library, t he Advisory Neighborhood Commission, the D.C. Historic

oversee online schooling this fall won’t h ave. On bad days, Marnie reminded herself that the neighborhood public school, just two blocks a way, w as legally obliged to take Raya back. There were times, Marnie said, when her daughter “ had her t eenager on” and “I just sort of wanted her somewhere else and school seemed a s good a place as any.” To t he Kenneys, the most important difference between their home-schooling and what shellshocked parents had to do this past spring, and will again have to do this fall, was the freedom to make their own decisions. Zoom call meetings were unnecessary. I f teacher or student didn’t l ike the scheduled lesson, they could do something else. “In ninth grade, when her English teacher could tell she was getting a little disinterested, she took a break a nd switched to a

education. Marnie said she had rough moments with Raya. S he personally t aught her daughter a world religion class and had to boot her out several times for being unresponsive. But eavesdropping o n the child when she was with other teachers w as often a joy. “I’ve listened to their passionate discussions, witnessed her i ntense curiosity and sense of humor, and was a bit in awe of her willingness a nd ability to respectfully challenge what she heard,” Marnie said. “It was also c onfirming when I would hear her say, ‘ I don’t g et i t,’ and the instructor would start over with a new approach.” Such reassuring moments are probably not enough to turn most parents into home-schoolers. The Kenneys concede it was hard work. They h ad an emergency plan that parents forced to

neighborhood public school. Both were provided. Not only did the teacher agree to spend off- hours with Raya, the school’s warmhearted principal also asked what else the Kenneys needed. Dennis, a criminal justice professor, and Marnie, a product, graphic a nd interior designer, found an assortment of teachers, many recommended by friends. They p aid the i nstructors about $50 an hour. The one-on-one lessons, they said, cost them less than half of what they would have paid to put Raya in a private school. Marnie inadvertently reminded me of my f avorite moment as a school p arent. When my s on the frazzled father was himself in ninth grade, his school let me sit in on his math class. I h eard h im grill t he teacher on several points. I never again worried about his

Marnie and
Dennis Kenney,
residents of D.C.,
just completed
eight years of
home-schooling
their daughter,
Raya, a newly
minted high
school graduate. I asked what
advice t hey had for people like
my s on and daughter-in-law, who
found last spring’s o nline
teaching and Zooming at h ome to
be the u ltimate torture.
Many o f the details of what the
Kenneys did astonished me. I
have long admired home-
schooling parents but did not
know their range of options was
so wide. Here are examples:
When the Kenneys suggested
home-schooling, Raya said she
would agree if she g ot two things:
a locker like her friends would
have and a fifth-grade teacher she
loved who worked at t heir

One couple’s useful secrets for successfully home-schooling this academic year

Jay
Mathews

higher than the number being caught or reported. Research has shown that instructors believe cheating h appens much less often than students do, which means they may not be looking for it. When they do find it, many choose to simply give cheaters an F, without reporting the incidents fur- ther. “I had a conversation with a group of students several months ago,” said James Pitarresi, vice provost at Binghamton Universi- ty. “A nd one of the students said, ‘Look, you know, probably 80 percent of the class is looking at Chegg. What are you going to do, expel all of us?’ ” Chegg, which offers online tu- toring services, declined to com- ment at length. A spokesman said the company supports academic integrity a nd hasn’t s een “ any rela- tive increase in honor code issues since the covid-19 crisis began.” In an interview with the New York Times, Chegg chief executive Dan Rosensweig, when asked whether his company’s services were being used for cheating, said: “Let’s face it: Students have always found a way, whether it’s i n fraternities, o r whether they go to Google. But Chegg is not built for that.” The firm reported $153 million in revenue for the second quarter, when the pandemic shutdowns were at their peak — a 63 percent year-over-year increase. Colleges were not the only institutions to rush examinations online. Advanced placement, SAT and other admissions tests also went virtual in the spring. So did law school entrance and placement exams, professional certifi- cation tests for f inancial managers

and food handlers and many others. The College Board, which ad- ministers the AP tests, reconfig- ured these exams to be “open book” when they were moved online, but without proctoring. Stu- dents reportedly used private messaging apps to collaborate on answers. Even before the exams began, College Board officials tweeted about “a ring of students who were developing plans to cheat” a nd canceled their registra- tions. The College Board won’t dis- close whether any cheating actu- ally happened. A spokesman would say only that “at-home t est- ing presents some different security challenges” and that the organization took s teps to prevent i t. “One student with a pattern of cheating is an ethical problem for that student. Multiple students with a pattern of cheating deval- ues any grade or degree they might be receiving,” said Steve Saladin, a co-author of a study published in the spring by the Journal of the National College Testing Association. “ And when cheating spreads to many students in many programs and schools, degrees and grades cease to provide a measure of an i ndivid- ual’s preparedness for a profes- sion or position. And perhaps even more importantly, it suggests a society that blindly accepts any means to an end as a given.” [email protected]

This story about online testing was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

BY DEREK NEWTON

When universities went online
in response to the coronavirus
pandemic, so did the tests their
students took. But one of the peo-
ple w ho logged on to take an e xam
in a pre-med chemistry class at a
well-known Mid-Atlantic univer-
sity turned out not to be a student
at a ll.
He was a plant. An impostor. A
paid ringer.
Proctors — remote monitors
some schools have hired to watch
test-takers through their web-
cams — discovered by reviewing
video recordings that this same
person had taken tests for at least
a dozen students enrolled a t seven
universities across t he country.
But h e was in Q atar, beyond the
reach of any attempts to hold him
accountable, according to proc-
tors familiar with the situation.
They c ould not say what happened
to the students who allegedly
hired him.
It was a dramatic case b ut far
from unique. Universal online
testing has created a documented
increase in cheating, often be-
cause universities, colleges and
testing companies were unpre-
pared for t he scale of t he transfor-
mation or unable or unwilling to
pay for safeguards, according to
faculty members and testing ex-
perts.
Even with trained proctors
watching test-takers and c hecking
their IDs, cheating is up. Before
the coronavirus forced millions of
students online, o ne of t he compa-

nies that provides that service, ProctorU, caught people cheating on fewer than 1 percent of the 340 ,000 exams it administered from January through March. During the height of remote testing, the c ompany says, the number of exams it supervised jumped to 1.3 million from April through June, and the cheating rate rose above 8 percent. “We can only imagine what the rate of i nappropriate testing activ- ity is when no one is watching,” said Scott McFarland, chief executive of P roctorU. And for most online t est-takers, no one has been watching. One reason is that, as demand for online testing spiked, proctoring ca- pacity was overwhelmed. One company, Examity, suspended its live proctoring services during t he demand surge when its 1,000 proctors in India were locked down to curb the spread of the coronavirus there. Ninety-three percent of instructors think students are more likely to cheat online than in person, according t o a survey conducted in May by the publishing and digital education company Wiley. Only a third said they were using some type of p roc- toring to prevent it. Many c olleges and universities moved ahead with online testing without super- vision to save money. Others opted instead for less expensive, scaled- down kinds of test security, such as software that can lock a web browser while a student takes a test. While locking a b rowser d uring

an exam may help — and about 15 percent of instructors take that step, the Wiley survey found — it can’t s top o ther f orms o f cheating. “You cannot g ive an exam if it is not proctored,” said Charles M. Krousgrill, a professor of engi- neering at Purdue University, where faculty have been more willing to publicly discuss cheating than their counterparts at many other schools. When, after the coronavirus shutdowns, Purdue gave students extra time to take their tests online, said Krousgrill, “there was rampant dishonesty.” He de- scribed some students in his de- partment organizing v ideoconfer- ences and s haring answers. “ Once we went to online instruction, we could not watch. [The students] knew it and knew the g ame w as up for g rabs.” Online tests have also meant a booming business for companies that sell homework and test answers, including Chegg and Course Hero. Students pay sub- scription fees to get answers to questions on tests or copies of entire tests with answers already provided. The tests are uploaded by other students who have already t aken them, in exchange for credits, or answers are quickly provided by “ tutors” who work f or the s ites. Though these sites have been around since before the pandemic, their use appears to have ex- ploded as more tests are given online. Students used Chegg to allegedly cheat on online exams

and tests in the spring at schools including Georgia Tech, Boston University, North Carolina State and Purdue, according to faculty at those institutions and news re- ports. At North Carolina State, more than 200 of the 800 students in a single Statistics 311 class were re- ferred for disciplinary action for using “tutor-provided solutions” to exam questions from Chegg, said Tyler Johnson, the course co- ordinator. After the exam, Johnson said, he asked his university to get Chegg to remove the questions, citing copyright law. Chegg did, and it furnished a report of users who had either posted o r accessed the exam materials. “I was initially really naive to the extent to which these services are utilized by students,” h e said. T he North Carolina State students have protested in a petition that they d idn’t k now using Chegg would be c onsidered cheating and that Johnson showed “no regard to the personal stresses we are enduring and have endured throughout t he semester.” Krousgrill and h is colleagues at Purdue found “ a massive number” of students w ho had used Chegg to get test answers, he said. In one class, Krousgrill said, as many as 60 students out of 250 had done so, and 100 students in a col- league’s class were identified as having used Chegg in a similar fashion. The number of students who are cheating is almost certainly

Shift to online school means more cheating

ing after GW paused the resident adviser program. “A nd some even run for local office.” Patronella, who lives in Hous- ton, said she’s looking for new housing in D.C. Her life is in the District, she said, and she p lans to stay after she graduates with a degree in political communica- tion in December. But she also understands the risk she could pose to the community and will have to self-quarantine for 14 days under the recent city order. “While I’ve been following social distancing guidelines in Houston, I understand traveling by air and coming from a hot s pot for covid- 19 cases necessitates a self-quarantine,” she said. “It’s a minor i nconvenience in the grand scheme of things, and I would want others to follow the same guidelines if I were in the other position.” Patronella said there’s “some truth” in images that depict y oung people as willing to shirk public health guidelines. But the people she knows are more concerned about escaping unsafe situations at home or returning to the con- nections they’ve forged in the Dis- trict. For Price, it was important he not only finish his lease, but his senior year at G W, i n the c ity. “We don’t go to parties. We don’t usually congregate in groups above eight at any given time,” Price said. “We’re still very mindful of all the p recautions.” [email protected]

Tenleytown Main Street, a nonprofit that works with neighborhood businesses. Miles added that businesses typically see an uptick in sales toward the end of August, when roughly 14,000 undergrad- uate, graduate and law students make their way back to school. Area businesses, like Seoul- spice, p artner with AU a nd accept electronic payments from students’ university accounts. Last year those payments accounted for about 5 percent of the fast - casual Korean restaurant’s Ten- leytown sales, said Danielle Wilt, vice p resident of Seoulspice. “So we’re just expecting that to not be there a t all,” Wilt said. Joseph Oh, owner of Coffee Na- ture, said he saw sales decline in March, when AU shuttered and the D.C. government started issu- ing stay-at-home guidance. “I’m not sure if I’ll get the cus- tomers back to 100 percent by the fall because of covid,” said Oh, who has been in Tenleytown for about eight years. “A ll the students, most are staying at their homes, and they’re not coming back.” But college students add more to their communities than their dollars, said Amy Patronella, a rising senior and former resident adviser at G W. “Many of my fellow college students babysit and pet sit for people in D.C., work in D.C. restaurants and stores or are part of D.C. social groups and athletic leagues,” said Patronella, who re- cently lost her on-campus hous-

who live and work on campuses are being asked to monitor their symptoms d aily. To limit the number of people in the city, P atrick L. Wojahn, may- or of College Park, is asking prop- erty owners and landlords to al- low students to break their leases. “I know that landlords them- selves are going through difficult and challenging times right now, but I hope they will consider this as a matter of safety a nd the health of our community,” Wojahn said. More than 20,000 U-Md. students t ypically live on and around campus, but that number will be much smaller this fall, Wojahn said. The university housed about 40 percent of its undergraduates — more than 11,000 people — on campus last fall, university data show. That number will be cut roughly in half this semester, Wojahn said. About 80 percent of classes this semester will be conducted online, and the university has limited on-campus housing. While residents worry too many students will crowd their neighborhoods, businesses that operate near schools are concerned there won’t be enough. In Tenleytown, a D.C. neighborhood that attracts students and employees from American Universi- ty, restaurants and coffee shops have been suffering since the on- set of the pandemic. “The absence of that student population, the faculty population i s definitely going to be felt by our businesses,” said Leigh Cathe- rine Miles, executive director of

students go home or go places, and I see it as a problem of how you manage that. How do you make sure that your student body is safe from that one or two per- sons who comes back and is in- fected and may not even know himself or herself?” In College Park, residents have reservations. “I have as much faith in them as I had in myself between 17 a nd 21,” Aaron Springer, who has lived in College Park since 200 1, said about students. He’s already no- ticed some students, mostly ath- letes, around the city. T he first day of classes is Aug. 31. The 51-year-old arts educator admitted he’s “less comfortable” with going to the grocery store. Not just because his n eighbors are part of a group that tends to have mild, if any, symptoms upon con- tracting the coronavirus and are likely to pass the virus to older adults, but also because there will be more people in his neighborhood in general. “There are more vectors that I could be exposed to,” Springer said. “I’m just concerned that people need to be adequately tested, people need to be adequately wearing masks a nd social distancing.” Officials at the university are requiring students and employees returning to College Park — or any of the other 11 institutions within the University System of Mary- land — to get tested for the coronavirus within two weeks before arriving to campus. And people

and participating in coronavirus testing required by the university — will q uash any tension between students and residents. The university is providing free tests to students and employees who live or work on or near the campus. “I really do believe the relation- ship between Georgetown students living in the neighborhood and the residents is very good,” said Rick Murphy, chairperson of the Advisory Neighborhood Com- mission that represents neighborhoods surrounding Georgetown’s campus. “My expectation is that the group homes we’ve already leased for the academic year will be occupied.” About 175 houses around the university are typically leased to students and house as many as six people at a t ime, Murphy said. Disputes between residents and students are rare, said James Moorman, 82, a Georgetown resident of 35 years. He ended a Sun- day afternoon walk through the historic neighborhood by tugging at s ome weeds in his front y ard. Moorman said he’s not concerned for himself — he’s been socially distant and stays away from nearby restaurants on Georgetown’s crowded main street — but the presence of the virus makes him concerned for the students. “They’re going to come from all different places. It would be hard to imagine if nobody came back that had an infection a t all,” Moor- man said about the students. “A nd, of course, periodically the

take some of their classes on cam-
pus. S ince t hen, the university has
retracted parts of its reopening
plan and will conduct the fall se-
mester online.
“In our minds, it’s either go
home and pay rent for a year in a
place we don’t live in or, at least,
live in D.C. and follow the guide-
lines,” said Price, who is from
Houston. He also moved near the
university before D.C. Mayor Mu-
riel E. Bowser (D) imposed travel
restrictions that require travelers
from coronavirus hot spots, in-
cluding Texas, to self-quarantine
for two weeks.
Monitoring the actions of
young people in college towns will
require collaboration between
universities, local officials and law
enforcement, said state Sen. Jim
Rosapepe (D), whose district in-
cludes College Park.
“Our residential campus is a lot
like a cruise ship on land. A high
concentration of people who like
to socialize,” Rosapepe said. “Be-
fore the pandemic, if you live in
College Park, you see a good bit of
not-very-responsible behavior,
and so I think people are con-
cerned about whether the stu-
dents who come back, as opposed
to those who don’t c ome back, will
be on their best behavior.”
Local leaders near Georgetown
University hope a compact that
asks students to agree to follow
public health guidelines — includ-
ing logging symptoms on a daily
basis, practicing good hygiene

NEIGHBORS FROM B1

Residents brace for college students’ return, but businesses fear more losses

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Chew on This: A Q&A with Food Critic Tom Sietsema at

11:00 a.m. ET on August 12 The Post’s famed foodie last week talked outdoor dining, gift cards, soft shell crabs, wait staff turnover, happy hours, fancy dinners, and eating gluten free. Got a question that slipped through the cracks? Post it now then tune in on Wednesday.

The Washington Post - USA (2020-08-10)

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