Students ‘twice as likely to cheat’ in online exams

Students were twice as likely to cheat in online exams following the rapid switch to digital assessment last summer, a survey suggests.

A survey of 1,608 students in higher education institutions across Germany found that 61.4 per cent said that 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 per cent 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,” the paper says.

THE Campus resource: Using fair assessment to tackle the rise in online cheating

Universities were often forced to switch online in a matter of days and “maintaining academic integrity likely 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 both online and in-person exams.

Stefan Janke, an educational psychologist at the University of Mannheim and one of the preprint’s authors, said “the pandemic and the lockdown came very suddenly to all of us. 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,” he added.

Dr Janke said that universities should consider more collaborative approaches to assessment, or setting open-book exams that require internet research, as these may help students to develop skills that would be highly valued in the workplace.

Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London, said that, while the results would need to be confirmed after peer review, they weren’t surprising.

For Dr Lancaster, the decision to press ahead with online exams last summer so students could complete their studies was the right one but added that “we can certainly learn from the Covid-19 experience”.

“Students have been under a lot of pressure over the last year. That doesn't excuse cheating, but it should serve as a reminder to the sector that we need to make sure that students feel fully supported and so should not need to resort to taking shortcuts,” he said.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com