Who's Cheating Whom?

I love Alfie Kohn – his writing is consistently clear, constructive and filled with sound arguments based on bulletproof research that continue to surprise even though the conclusions are completely obvious to anyone who spends a moment thinking about it. In this essay he shows how we, the teachers and our institutions, are the principle cause of cheating, creating elaborate and demotivating gotchas and systems designed to make cheating rewarding and, perhaps, inevitable. As a result, we are cheating students out of the joy learning. We are teaching them not to learn. Full of useful insights and simple but not simplistic solutions.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/cheating.htm

I am a professional learner, employed as a Full Professor and Associate Dean, Learning & Assessment, at Athabasca University, where I research lots of things broadly in the area of learning and technology, and I teach mainly in the School of Computing & Information Systems. I am a proud Canadian, though I was born in the UK. I am married, with two grown-up children, and three growing-up grandchildren. We all live in beautiful Vancouver.

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