Students are twice as likely to cheat in online exams following the rapid switch to digital assessment last summer, suggests a survey. A survey of 1,608 students in higher education institutions across Germany found that 61.4 percent said they had used “unallowed assistance and/or engaged in direct exchange with other students” during online exams over summer 2020.
For on-site exams taken over the same period, 31.7 percent admitted to this sort of behaviour, according to a preprint published on PsyArXiv. “The overall results speak for the notion that the swift application of ad hoc online testing during 2020 has led to negative consequences for academic integrity,” says the paper.
Universities were often forced to switch online in a matter of days and “maintaining academic integrity often became a secondary priority compared to maintaining some sort of instruction and managing limited resources”.
The researchers found that 874 of survey respondents took only on-site exams during the 2020 summer semester; 385 took only online exams and 349 participants took them online and in-person.
Stefan Janke, an educational psychologist at the University of Mannheim and one of the preprint’s authors, says “the pandemic and the lockdown came very suddenly. Students were confronted with a new kind of learning environment with which they were not familiar and would have felt additional pressures and stresses. Online examinations without additional safety procedures may have provided students with the sense that they can cheat without being detected.”
Dr. Janke suggests that universities should consider more collaborative approaches to assessment, or allow open-book exams that permit Internet research. Such reforms will help students to develop skills that are highly valued in the workplace, he suggests.
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