ABSTRACT
Much of what happens in assessment that poses harms to inclusion happens in the name of preventing or detecting cheating. Examinations, short task turnaround times, and restrictions on the use of resources are usually put in place out of fear that students will cheat; but they pose challenges to inclusion through differentially disadvantaging already disadvantaged groups of students. This chapter proposes that validity can act as a way to think about these trade-offs and ask if they are, on balance, worth it. Cheating can be viewed as a threat to validity as it makes assessors less able to judge what a student is capable of. Exclusion can be viewed as a threat to validity as it creates barriers that misrepresent what some groups of students are capable of. A validity-centric perspective requires inclusion as a mandatory concern in any conversation about cheating and anti-cheating approaches.
