One of our savvy commenters brought up a very important aspect of the online education debate a couple of days ago. One of the factors working against the perceived quality of online degrees is the ease with which online students can cheat. A 2004 paper published in the Association for the Advancement of Computer Education journal puts it well, if not succinctly:

There is an existing perception, often expressed by those who oppose distance education, that online courses are of less “quality” than courses provided in the face-to-face (F2F) classroom environment. While some of these objections appear to be transparent expressions of resistance to change, there is an element of real concern among faculty that academic quality may be compromised by the new medium, by related changes in the population of students, and by the inability of students and faculty to maintain the type of personal and scholarly relationship that best typifies the academic “learning environment.

If there’s no easy way to maintain accountability, then the cheater’s degree is worthless–and if yours is from the same school, doesn’t that make yours worthless too?

Not quite. Here’s why.

Let me start this argument by not denying it’s a problem. Cheating has been a problem since the days of Aristotle and there’s no question that technology has made it easier. But there are a few mitigating factors to consider.

To start with, any online student who really, really doesn’t care about actually earning his or her degree can hit up a diploma mill and not even pretend to study. That fact alone helps to weed some of the worst offenders out of the real (and virtual) classrooms.

Let’s also remember that cheating was certainly a big problem long before the Internet came along. College students have been copying and pasting since the Apple IIc hit campuses (and laboriously retyping before that). In 2000, one University of Virginia physics professor was able to analyze 1,850 student papers and found that about 9% had plagiarized. Harvard and Stanford have cheaters, too–but does anyone think their degrees are worthless?

Next week, I’ll have more on the innovative methods being used by profs around the world to prevent and detect cheating in online degree programs. Turns out cheating isn’t quite as hard to detect as you’d think…