Will Cheating Kill EMS Online Education?

Isn’t it sad that one of the questions typically asked of online education vendors by EMS managers goes something like: “Is it possible for anyone who uses your system to print out the test? I’m concerned that people will pass it around.”

It’s been our experience that almost any discussion about EMS online ed turns sooner or later to the problem of cheating. Cheating occurs in EMS education as it does in any educational venue, and as we continue to embrace the use of the Internet to train and assess the knowledge of EMS personnel, EMS learners will have more freedom to take classes and assessments without direct supervision. Given this freedom, common sense suggests that the cheating issue is going to loom larger.

This article explores why it happens and, more important, how we can prevent it with good old-fashioned leadership and hard work.

One thing is sure: Field personnel, administrators and educators all have a role to play in solving the problem.

The Cheating Problem

Examples of cheating we’ve witnessed or heard about include: letting a rookie paramedic or EMT take a test for more seasoned personnel, passing around the answers to a quiz, several people working on a test together and—here’s one for you computer geeks—hitting the back button at just the right moment after submitting an online quiz, allowing the cheater to change an answer just marked wrong.

The National Association of EMS Educators (NAEMSE) recently ran a survey on its website that asked about cheating, to which 375 people from 46 states responded. Ninety percent of the respondents were either EMS educators or education administrators. While this was not a scientific study, the results of the survey help to define the problem. There was near unanimity among the respondents that cheating does occur in EMS education and more than a quarter of them (27%) said it occurs often. When asked what the leading causes of cheating were, failure to study, laziness and a desire to “just get their ticket punched” were the most common replies. Time pressure and poor test supervision were also cited frequently. Only a handful thought that cheating occurred because the tests were too hard—which may not be too surprising given that teachers, rather than students, were answering these questions.

Almost 60% of the respondents reported actual cheating incidents or strong suspicion of such incidents in their own organizations over the last year. When questioned about the cheating incidents known to them personally and the consequences that occurred, respondents working in government-based EMS agencies were more likely to describe less severe consequences, such as requiring that a test be retaken, verbal or written reprimands or no action at all. Instructors working in private companies, vo-techs, academies and colleges were more likely to report course failures, firings and suspensions as consequences.

The NAEMSE survey did not look into what we might call the “short-cut” cases. These cases are not clear-cut incidents of cheating in the traditional sense, but they are giving EMS online education a bad reputation. Online learners who are taking short cuts are the people who brag about how they “beat the system,” as if that were the challenge.

These are people who spend little or no time with the educational content of an online lesson. As soon as they figure out how to click through the content, they go right to the test and within a matter of minutes may have completed several hours of continuing education. This problem has generated concern among leaders at the Continuing Education Coordinating Board for EMS (CECBEMS), the National Registry of EMTs (NREMT), and state and local EMS agencies across the nation who are responsible for certifying the quality of EMS care provided.