Fighting Fire with Fire: Using Excel Macros to Combat Academic Dishonesty in Excel Projects

Academic dishonesty is on the rise, and technology is partly to blame. Student work is increasingly performed online, and technological platforms to facilitate cheating are plentiful and easily accessible. Simply stated, technology makes it easier to cheat. We believe that the best way to combat technology-based academic dishonesty is by leveraging technology for prevention and detection. This paper demonstrates how Excel macros can be utilized to efficiently and effectively prevent and detect several forms of cheating that students employ in Excel projects. We provide sufficient instructor resources so that educators can replicate this cheating solution, and describe our findings after employing this macro cheating solution in 1,611 Excel projects administered in our Accounting Department. We also discuss the results of a student survey that captures perceptions of the efficacy of this macrobased cheating solution.