USING EXAM SCORES TO ESTIMATE THE PREVALENCE OF CLASSROOM CHEATING

Instructors for introductory courses with large enrollments must routi nely work to curb cheating during exams, A method used for such purpos es is described here, Perhaps more interesting than the method's effec tiveness is the inherited ability to draw inference on unknown paramet ers of interest, including the proportion of students who cheat (as op posed to guess) when faced with not knowing how to obtain the solution to a multiple-choice exam question. For estimation we consider the me thod of maximum likelihood.