This is a guest column

I’ve said or written this statement countless times, but it bears repeating as often as possible. Protecting exam integrity is not only an issue of ensuring a proper measure of competency; it is a matter of equity and right now, we are failing to do anything about it.

Fair exams where everyone has an equal opportunity to show what they’ve learned or to demonstrate competency is the essential bedrock of opportunity. No one should be cheating or gaining an unfair advantage over another. When one person cheats on any kind of evaluative measure – be it turning in a portfolio displaying their work, an oral exam in front of a panel, a written test, a bubble-sheet exam, an essay, or any method to check a person’s knowledge or mastery – the person (or persons) who did not cheat are disadvantaged when other people taking the same exam or subjected to the same evaluation do cheat. This disadvantage exists even if the evaluation isn’t comparative, meaning that each person is judged upon their own merits and work.

Furthermore, it is important to know that academic cheating of our parents’ era is dramatically different from cheating today. Increasingly often, the cheater has purchased their advantage. They bought exam questions ahead of time off of the internet. They hired an impersonator to sit an exam for them. They hired an essay mill or used AI to write their paper. Or, they paid for a service that would quickly return answers to homework questions or exam questions. In more and more of these cheating examples, an exchange of money has taken place in order for the test-taker to gain an advantage on their exam and over their peers.

This is how cheaters are driving a deeper wedge between those who have and those who have-not.

Purchases of exams or essay mill papers can be extraordinarily expensive and good enough to earn an “A.” These same purchased exams or essay mill papers can also be cheap and of pathetically poor quality, likely to earn a “C” or even a failing grade. You see, the place where people go to buy essays and course or exam impersonators is a marketplace. Pay more, get a higher quality product. In fact, there is often active bidding taking place. Course impersonators and essay writers barter for the privilege to help a student cheat. A student can buy themselves an A for say, the cost of this semester’s books, or buy themselves a C for the cost of their lunch.

When these transactions occur to gain an unfair advantage, democracy and the opportunities afforded by a college education collapse. What is increasingly alarming is that the examples I’ve just given aren’t the only place where money buys favor and increased opportunity in college. There’s another multi-billion dollar business sector of cheating providers staring us straight in the face: mega companies masquerading as student helpers. These cheating companies use innocuous sounding taglines and descriptors like “homework help site” and “study aid.” Make no mistake, these companies are cheating providers. They break the rules by giving students answers right in the middle of their test. These cheating companies post the exams for academic courses and credentialing exams and also supply all the answers, simply when asked for them.

If we look at this institutional cheating that’s going on – in plain sight – only from an economic standpoint, while temporarily setting aside the ethical failure going on, a student who canNOT afford to pay for that “homework help site” is at a very significant disadvantage to his or her peers who can afford to pay. I will not name these so-called homework help sites so as to not give them the search engine juice they so crave but their initials start with C, CH, and Qu just to point out the most popular. These companies are a pariah to education equity, a scourge on the very principle of equal opportunity and potential for self-improvement for those seeking betterment for themselves and their society.

One way to address this is to change assessments or remove the competitive nature of assessments. I agree wholeheartedly as an academic, as a parent, and as a professional that changing how we assess learning can improve how we measure learning and competency. The rationale here is that making an examinee’s score entirely independent of other examinees’ scores means no one loses out even if their classmate(s) cheat.

This can absolutely cut down on cheating, but it will not stop it. A cheating company can be hired to write an essay, for example. Someone else can complete assignments for a student, or design their biology experiment. Essays and experiments are excellent ways to gauge understanding in a class of 20 but not very practical in a calculus class of 300.

There are times when due to sheer number of examinees or the nature of the content, that an exam where there is either the right answer or the wrong one, is the best way to measure understanding. There are also times when results need to be compared against an entire cohort of examinees. Or, examinees need to meet a minimum standard to demonstrate their ability to move into a program or move on.

The TOEFL exam is one of these exams. The sheer number of candidates vying for U.S. university admissions makes it impossible to test each applicant in person. Furthermore, a student who gains admission when they are not fully competent with English faces a potentially tortuous educational journey. Worse yet, that student who cheated to get into a university undoubtedly shut out another person who was fully qualified to make it in. Exams like these exist for a very good reason and securing them is essential.

Cheating is not a simple problem and it is certainly not going to be solved by simple changes. We must, however, recognize that beyond the threat to institutional reputations and the bedrock of academia, cheating is a human problem leaving significant numbers of casualties in its wake. Individuals are not making it into college, not making it into med school, being denied admissions, performing poorly against their peers, missing out on awards and recognition, failing credential exams all because they have been cheated against. These victims are unknown and unprotected and right now we’re doing next to nothing to help them.

Dr. Ashley Norris has spent nearly 15 years in higher education as a faculty member and administrator across major institutions including the University of Alabama and Samford University. Most recently, she served as the dean of programmatic accreditation and regulatory affairs at the University of Phoenix. Currently, Dr. Norris is the chief academic and chief compliance officer at Meazure Learning.