When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, education in schools, colleges, and universities across the world went online. While many educational professionals found that some classes can be relatively easily adapted to a new mode of delivery (via Zoom, MS Teams or similar platforms), assessment proved much trickier to handle. Students found themselves unsupervised during tests, which resulted in a surge of violations academic integrity. While a host of papers has already been published offering an insight into how students cheat and how instructors can combat it, this paper looks at the issue from the students’ perspective. Can it be at all possible that the way to stop cheating lies not in bringing ever more technology into online classrooms, such as adding cameras etc., but rather in changing the assessment practices themselves? Drawing on a survey conducted among university students in Russia, it aims to answer the following questions: - What propelled students to cheat more when the classes moved online? - What types of assessment were the students asked to do during the pandemic? - Were they different from how they used to be assessed before? If yes, which types of assessment did the students themselves find more relevant? - What, in students’ own view, should instructors do to minimise cheating in distance education? Based on the received answers, the paper lays out a number of recommendations that instructors may want to adopt if they are to minimise the academic dishonesty that is otherwise going to stay ripe in distance learning.
What COVID Taught Us about Assessment: Students’ Perceptions of Academic Integrity in Distance Learning (preprint)