Cellphones, Handy Tools for Emergency Alerts, Could Be Used for Cheating During Tests

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Many colleges use cellphones to warn the campus of potential threats. The devices are, after all, in almost every student's pocket. But now worried instructors and administrators say that students might use phones to cheat on tests.

Not only do cellphones give students a new way to stealthily ask a friend for help. They now have the ability to access Google and other Internet-based services that make it easy to retrieve information from the Web via text message. The potential for dishonesty is making some officials consider a ban on cellphone use in the classroom. Others, however, note that such a ban could hinder emergency-alert systems.

A new service that particularly worries some professors and administrators is called ChaCha, which allows users to text any question to a network of people and get an answer within minutes.

James M. Burns, a supplemental-faculty member in the English department at the University of Delaware, was initially skeptical of ChaCha's accuracy after learning about the service from his college-age son.

"I said, 'Well how reliable can that be?'" he recalls.

So he and his son put ChaCha to the test, asking it to name Jack Kerouac's alter ego in The Subterraneans. To Mr. Burns's surprise, ChaCha sent back "Leo Percepied," the correct response.

Though Mr. Burns has no evidence of students' using ChaCha during class, he was concerned enough to send a message to all of his fellow faculty members at Delaware explaining what ChaCha is and how it could be used. In response, some instructors at the university are rethinking their policies about cellphones in the classroom. (Concerns about ChaCha were first reported last month in The Philadelphia Inquirer.)

At least one college has experienced an incident in which students used text messaging — though not ChaCha — to obtain answers during an exam. In May, 11 nursing students at Prairie View A&M University were not allowed to graduate after they admitted they had cheated on a comprehensive exam by text-messaging students who had already completed the test. The misconduct was reported to faculty members by other students in the room who noticed their peers texting during the exam.

That same month, 10 California high-school students admitted using text messaging to cheat on an Advanced Placement exam.

Gerard P. O'Sullivan, vice president for academic affairs at Neumann College, in Aston, Pa., is so worried about ChaCha that he is calling on administrators to consider a policy restricting cellphone use during class.

He says a campuswide policy would send a message to students that phone use is not acceptable, and keep instructors from having to seem like the "bad guy" for making students keep their cellphones in their backpacks. "It's better to have a unified policy because it relieves the professor of the onus of enforcement," Mr. O'Sullivan says.

But other university officials think banning cellphone use during class would compromise the effectiveness of campus emergency-alert systems.

At Temple University, the campus's emergency-alert system is one reason that officials have decided to encourage students to leave their phones on vibrate during class — though individual professors are free to set their own policies for cellphone use in classrooms, according to Hillel J. Hoffmann, a Temple spokesman.

Mr. O'Sullivan suggests that professors try to find a compromise, like prohibiting students from making phone calls or "texting out" during class, but allowing them to have their phones on vibrate mode.

Such nuanced policies can be difficult to enforce, says Brian T. Nichols, chief information-technology security and policy officer at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. Would students be able to check their text messages in case they receive an emergency alert? Can instructors determine whether students are sending a message as opposed to just receiving one? Would banning only partial use be an effective way to prevent cheating? "It's a really fine line," Mr. Nichols says.

Potential Conflict?

Donald L. McCabe, a Rutgers University management professor who has done extensive research on academic integrity, says that colleges need to be tougher on cellphone use, and that individual instructors should assume students are cheating when they use their phones during an exam.

Although he believes that only a small number of students are brazen enough to use a service like ChaCha to get answers during an exam, Mr. McCabe says it is easy for students to become addicted to cheating. And once some start doing it, others often follow.

"A lot of students feel they have to cheat to not be left behind," he says.

DJ Bowen III, a sophomore at St. Mary's College of California, says he understands how cheating can spread, but he adds that the small class size at St. Mary's all but eliminates the possibility of using a cellphone for answers during an exam.

"If you even think about pulling out a cellphone, you're toast," Mr. Bowen says.

He has never heard of anyone using ChaCha for academic purposes and says students usually turn to the service to settle bets and see how someone responds to questions like, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" (to which ChaCha replied, "I do not know the answer, but I do know the Egg McMuffin came before the Chicken McNugget!").

Mr. Nichols notes that there are other ways to alert people in classrooms in the event of an emergency. His campus already has a system that sends alerts via e-mail, text message, and on the university's Web pages. And he says that Louisiana State is discussing other methods that would reach people in classrooms without the use of either a phone or computer. Among the systems that some other colleges have set up are sirens, classroom phones capable of receiving incoming alerts, and flash alerts on projectors in multimedia classrooms.

"Text messaging is another tool that you can use in your toolbox, but it's definitely not the only one you want to depend on," Mr. Nichols says.