RESEARCH & TEACHING CRITICAL THINKING
  • Home
  • AI and Education
  • Higher Education Topics - Blog
  • Applied and Experiential Learning - Blog
  • Research & Teaching Critical Thinking - Blog
  • About
  • Media Coverage
  • Experiential and Applied Learning Examples
    • Experiential Learning Vietnam 2017
    • Monopoly for Teamwork
    • Learning in Hanoi
    • Hanoi Community Service
    • Saigon Starbucks Experience
    • Saigon Class Concert
    • Outside the Classroom

More about Academic Integrity in Our Changed World

6/15/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Please take two minutes to read the article at this link from a Singapore newspaper:

"NUS students get zero marks for cheating on take-home exam"

As students take more college courses online, either fully or in a hybrid seated+online configuration, getting the students to maintain academic integrity increases dramatically. It simply is too easy for a student to cheat if they are taking an exam or writing a paper online with no oversight -- i.e., without proctoring. Why does this matter to me? Two simple reasons:

Students who study to learn the material feel cheated by students who collaborate or plagiarize on exams.
  1. Some students -- think nurses, accountants, engineers, doctors, and other professional practitioners -- will be expected to have actually learned what they studied when they start to practice medicine, design buildings and bridges, or handle corporate and personal accounts.
  2. In a recent year, partway through a semester in a capstone strategic management course I taught in Singapore, I was talking with my students about academic integrity. One student raised his hand and I called on him. He said, and this is a verbatim quote: "Professor, it isn't cheating if you don't get caught." This actually happened!

After discovering that exam scores were significantly higher -- i.e., 20% or more higher -- with online multiple-choice question (MCQ) exams, I did an experiment in one of these capstone courses. I put a low-stakes MCQ exam online, scheduling it to be open for 30 minutes during a regular seated class session. The exam was intended to be taken independently, not collaboratively. The students had ten minutes to complete the exam during the 30-minute window. They started in the classroom, and then could go wherever they wanted to complete the exam during that 30-minute window.

I gave the students a countdown to the start of the exam, and the second the exam window opened, about 75% of the students ran out of the classroom to the tables in the hallways to form groups to take the exam together. The remaining 25% of the students stayed in the classroom. I had told everyone that they should take the exam the way the normally would, so they did. One group at a large table had a single student take the exam during the first 10-minute block and watched that student, advising him if he was unsure of the answer. When he finished they regrouped into three smaller groups and then watched and advised the one student in their smaller group has he or she took the exam. Finally, the remaining students went to their computers to take the exam in the last 10-minute block, with the students who had completed the exam watching and helping.

I knew this behavior existed from a few years back, when I discovered extremely high scores on a Masters-level online exam that -- are you ready for this -- nursing students were taking. Eventually, one of the students in the class complained. To her -- she had studied hard for the exam and had taken it by herself as instructed -- it was unfair that other students had high grades without actually learning the material. She had observed students in her class taking the exam in teams at computers in the library.

Many of my friends feel it is unfair to use plagiarism checking tools, or online exam monitoring tools. We would proctor the exam in the classroom. Why should we not proctor it online? And how do we treat the students who learn the material who feel cheated by the students who do not learn but plagiarize or get help during online exams?

Of course, we could stop giving MCQ exams. But students can cheat in online essays or open-ended question exams just as easily. I use the MCQ exams only to confirm that the students are reading and understanding the course material. I even give the students the subject of every question on the exam a week ahead. These exams account for a relatively small portion of the final grade. If I catch a student cheating on one of these, the student most likely will fail the course. But I need the monitoring tools for online exams to catch the cheating. (And yes, I use question pools and random question delivery to limit cheating. I've had a student answer a write-in question that wasn't on his delivered online exam because someone else had told him the question that the other student had received and this student gave the answer to that question.)

I use Project-Based-Learning methods with students working together all semester in teams. We could just give team-based grades. But if you teach, you know there are a lot of social loafers who expect the other team members to do the work, but expect the same grades as their team members.

I hate online exam monitoring. We must use it; out of fairness to students who try to learn the material, and because students will be expected to know what we teach when they start their careers.

This article, about online cheating in an Engineering program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), illustrates the problem. Congratulations to NUS both for giving the students zero grades, and noted their academic integrity failure in their permanent records. If we sanction students for cheating, and have ways to identify cheating, we may be able to reduce the "It isn't cheating if you don't get caught" mentality.


#college #highereducation #academicintegrity #integrity #honesty #onlineeducation #onlineexam
0 Comments

Preparing for Behavioral Event Interviews

8/30/2019

0 Comments

 
Lisa Mann, from the UNC Asheville Career Center, visited both capstone Strategy classes this week to help the students develop the skill of story telling for their future career searches.

This was an experiential process. The students wrote a story that might be relevant in a behavioral event job interview in the Situation - Action - Result (SAR) format. They then shared their stories with students in the class that they didn't know well to get feedback.

Lisa also had them write a story about a time they failed in the SAR format, and share that story with a friend in the room.

All of this is to help them when they graduate, which most will do in December or next May, and in their future careers.

​Link to UNC Asheville Career Center: https://www.unca.edu/success/career-center/

Link to Neil Bearden video about story telling: https://vimeo.com/354629176

Link to my LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/preparing-behavioral-event-interviews-paul-mcafee-mba-phd-abd
Picture
0 Comments

Strategic Planning & Implementation

7/29/2019

1 Comment

 
I have begun investigating offering a Strategic Planning & Implementation training program to businesses in the Buffalo/Niagara area. What would make this unique would be the use of the Business Strategy Game (BSG) simulation that I use for my capstone strategic management courses at Canisius College, Daemen College, and the University at Buffalo School of Management in Buffalo, and at the University at Buffalo School of Management business program in Singapore. The target companies would be manufacturing or product distribution companies. This is because the BSG simulation is for a globally manufactured product.

For Buffalo/Niagara area businesses, the benefit would be that members of all functions, such as Engineering, Finance, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Sales, could participate and apply what they know about their function during the planning and decisions-making stages of the simulation, and then see the results. Each function gets to see how its decisions affect the whole business.

The participants in each client company would form teams, with each team acting as an athletic shoe manufacturer. Here are details from the BSG website:
"The co-managers of each company are responsible for assessing market conditions, determining how to respond to the actions of competitors, forging a long-term direction and strategy for their company, forecasting upcoming sales volumes, and making decisions relating to:
  • Production operations (up to 10 decisions for each plant, with a maximum of 4 plants)
  • Upgrading plants and expanding/reducing plant capacity (up to 6 decisions per plant)
  • Worker compensation and training (3 decisions per plant)
  • Shipping and inventory management (up to 8 decisions each plant/geographic region)
  • Pricing and marketing (up to 10 decisions in each of 4 geographic regions)
  • Bids to sign celebrities to endorse their brand of footwear (2 decision entries per bid)
  • Corporate social responsibility and citizenship (up to 6 decision entries)
  • Financing of company operations (up to 8 decision entries)"

Learning outcomes for local business managers would include learning about data analysis, understanding strategic planning and decision-making, and seeing the interactive nature of business decisions. Each week of the corporate education program would represent a year of business in the BSG simulation industry.

I share these thoughts now to explore the level of interest. If you think this might be of use in your company, please get in touch with me on my LinkedIn page - www.linkedin.com/in/paulmcafee.

Two of the many data graphs are below, showing relative positions of the teams in one of my recent capstone strategic management courses.

Picture
Picture
#strategicmanagement #globalstrategy #corporatetraining #experientiallearning #businessstrategygame #strategysimulation
1 Comment

University at Buffalo classroom design for experiential learning

1/31/2019

0 Comments

 
Because all of the courses I teach involve team-based project work, it can be frustrating to have a classroom designed in the old lecture style, with arcs of fixed chairs and tables. Students have to contort themselves to work in teams. Increasingly, universities and colleges have begun to design classrooms with movable tables and chairs. This enables students to regroup in their teams quickly - and comfortably.

I am very happy that the classroom in the University at Buffalo School of Management Jacobs Building, where I currently teach the capstone Fundamentals of Strategic Management course, has chair-desk combos that can be rolled into team configurations quickly. The only challenge we will face is that the room is full, so students will need to sit in groups at the start of class, or shift to new desks when the team project work begins.

#experientiallearning #highereducation #universityatbuffalo #daemencollege #canisiuscollege #keukacollege
0 Comments
    View my profile on LinkedIn

      Subscribe by email

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    Paul McAfee

    My experiential learning Activities blog includes examples from my international teaching experiences. The Research blog includes studies I have read and comments on others' research, as well as my own.

    Read about examples from my teaching college business courses in China, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam, relating to both experiential learning and project-based learning.

    Please share your questions and thoughts here.

    Archives

    November 2024
    November 2023
    September 2023
    March 2023
    June 2022
    May 2022
    November 2021
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    October 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    November 2013

    Categories

    All
    Active Learning
    Canisius College
    Daemen College
    Diversity
    Drone Racing
    Experiential Learning
    Generation Z
    Global Strategy
    Higher Education
    Keuka College
    #Luxasia
    Millennials
    Nonbinary Gender Pronouns
    Paul McAfee
    Project Based Learning
    Project-Based Learning
    School Of Management
    Singapore
    STEM
    Strategic Management
    Transgender Terminology
    UNC Asheville
    University At Buffalo
    Vietnam

    RSS Feed

Copyright 2013-2025:
​Dr. Paul H. McAfee
LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/paulmcafee