Light posting for the next few days as I have a stack of exams and they don’t seem to be grading themselves.

One quick story to tell though.

As universities across the country and across the world settle in for final exams, people at universities are searching for a variety of things and some of them end up finding their way to different posts on my blog. I use a website that keeps track of visits to my site, including the website someone visited right before they came to mine. For example, when I add a new post, I usually put it in my Facebook status, and when someone clicks on that, I will see that they are coming from Facebook. Similarly, when people come here as a result of a Google search, I can click on the link and see what they were searching for, and the other sites that came up in their search.

New traffic in the last week or two has been a mix of both professors and students, judging by the IP addresses listed that are attributed to universities from the U.S., Turkey, South Korea, and India, to name a few countries. Some are faculty searching for what to do when they catch students cheating. Some are students searching for a few different things: 1) tips on how to cheat, 2) what will happen to them if they get caught cheating, and 3) what happens to their financial aid when they fail a class and/or don’t take a final exam. I always knew students searched the web for ways to cheat, but it’s a lot more real when you actually see it for yourself.

Some people may think that incentives don’t matter, and students are going to cheat regardless of the punishment. This provides a little anecdotal evidence showing that, at least in some cases, cheating is a calculated decision based on the perceived punishment. Similarly, whether to fail a class on purpose when a C is out of reach depends in part on the financial aid implications. University administrators and faculty would be wise to consider this when crafting their policies about punishment for academic dishonesty, replacing failing grades, and revoking financial aid when students fail courses and don’t even bother showing up to the final exam.