The transition to online learning in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic has provided many students with newfound opportunities to cheat on remote exams, causing what Shannon Boettcher, a University of Oregon chemistry professor, believes is a “huge problem with academic dishonesty across the nation in the light of remote learning and COVID-19.”
Boettcher defines academic dishonesty as “anything that is done that gives [students] an unfair advantage over other students,” regardless of whether the activity is explicitly banned in the syllabus. Punishments for academic integrity violations can range from an F on a test to expulsion from the university.
Since the beginning of spring term, some students have committed academic integrity violations by using course notes, peers and internet sources that were not as accessible in in-person courses with proctored exams. Students in some spring term courses interacted in large chat rooms where many students took tests together, according to Boettcher. However, “the vast majority of students definitely do not want to cheat; they just want to take a fair test,” Boettcher said.
“I think the challenge in the remote environment is that if students feel like other people are cheating,” he said, “even students who normally would never, ever consider cheating get drawn into it because they feel like, if they don’t, they’re going to be disadvantaged.”
While professors rarely use explicit curves based on a predefined formula, Boettcher said many instructors adjust scores based on overall grade distributions. As a result, students who cheat are more likely to get better scores and set the class curve while those who maintain academic honesty may be disadvantaged.
Boettcher said he took steps to make cheating difficult in his spring term general chemistry course, believing students would face an ethical challenge if many of their peers committed academic dishonesty. Boettcher restricted the exam window so students had less time than they would in an in-person class to do each problem. He thought, this way, it was more efficient to learn the material than to consult a peer or the internet during the test. Additionally, questions were randomized and students could not review a question once they submitted their answer.
“I basically made the test much more stressful,” he said. Although students could not consult another person while taking their exam, they were allowed to use their notes, textbook and the internet.
“I felt like this was important because for an undergraduate, if I said that you couldn’t use the internet, it is so tempting and easy and there’s no way to police it,” Boettcher said. “There would be a large fraction of students who would just maybe bend the rules and do a little quick phone search, and I just thought it was much easier to just make it open to everybody.”
At the end of spring term, he believed his methods were “quite successful” as scores were similar to his past, in-person general chemistry classes and were representative of students that tried to understand the material. But he admitted to making a mistake while creating his first two exams.
Many of Boettcher’s exam questions came from a general chemistry test bank. He said test banks are useful because they help instructors save time and avoid mistakes associated with writing original test questions. Shannon inserted the test bank questions as images so students would not be able to copy-paste them into a search engine.
What he didn’t realize until some students confronted him was that a person could type only the first few words and Google would automatically fill out the rest of the question in the search bar. Upon clicking “enter,” several of the top search results are for Chegg Study, a subscription-based service that provides answers to millions of textbook and homework questions.
“Some students figured out in between the first exam and the second exam that Chegg, which I didn’t realize was this comprehensive, actually has every single question from every single test bank that I have ever seen.”
Boettcher said he now modifies test bank questions to limit students’ use of Chegg during his exams, while maintaining his other testing strategies including open notes, randomized questions and a restricted time limit. Other instructors have resorted to other methods, like ProctorU, an online test proctoring software.
UO uses ProctorU’s low-cost option, ProctorU Record+, which locks down a user’s web browser and records them as they take their exam, flagging parts of the recording for review based on audio, eye movement and lighting.
The service costs $3 per student, per exam. UO paid ProctorU $5,130 in the summer and between $10,000 and $11,000 for classes using ProctorU in the fall, according to UO spokesperson Saul Hubbard. Thomas Greenbowe, senior instructor of chemistry and biochemistry, believes the university’s money should be spent elsewhere.
“We could have more graduate students being there to do recitation discussion sections,” he said. “We could have graduate students actually grade the exam if they were free response questions rather than rely on a lot of multiple choice questions. If that were the case, then I would rather see it be spent internally rather than externally.
Greenbowe said he used ProctorU for the first fall term exam in his introduction to chemistry principles class. Many of his students experienced technology issues and were kicked out of the testing software during the exam.
“No student should be subjected to any errors in technology while they’re taking an exam,” Greenbowe said. “We don’t want any student to have to deal with any other stress other than answering the content questions.”
Career Instructor of Biology Nicola Barber said she decided not to use ProctorU for her fall term general biology course — taught alongside Senior Instructor of Biology Cristin Hulslander — because she feared it might unfairly flag some students more than others.
“Particularly dark-skinned individuals have been flagged more for lighting issues and so I was worried about creating a barrier to students, particularly students of color in our class,” Barber said.
Instead, Barber and Hulslander had students promise to adhere to the university’s academic integrity policies, which has shown to be effective in reducing cheating in studies like Boston University marketing professor Nina Mazar’s. The teaching pair also allowed students to access one single-sided page of notes.
“One of our roles as instructors is creating a more equitable learning environment,” Barber said. “Part of that is disincentivizing cheating. We thought if students had this one page of notes, that that would disincentivize academic dishonesty, it would reduce test anxiety during a particularly stressful time and give students, really, the opportunity to learn and make connections in synthesizing their notes.”
Some students have reported experiencing excessive stress due to online testing procedures meant to reduce cheating. UO marine biology student Ryan McCarthy said his physics professor restricted the exam time limit so much that he didn’t have time to reference his allowed page of notes.
“The first time I took the exam, no one finished,” McCarthy said. “Almost nobody got any of the open-ended [questions] turned in.”
Conversely, McCarthy’s organic chemistry class had a five-hour time limit. The first question of the exam was true or false, asking students if they promised to maintain academic integrity. McCarthy said he doesn’t believe these questions are effective in preventing cheating because he doesn’t think students take them seriously.
In response to questions from students about when final scores would be published, McCarthy’s organic chemistry professor said he would “be done grading by now if I hadn’t spent so much time documenting academic integrity violations.”
Barber said although it is easier, in some ways, for students to cheat in remote classes, “there’s also ways that you could be more likely to be caught by cheating online as well.” For instance, instructors can see when individual students stop viewing a canvas quiz-taking page.
Barber said cheating harms “the whole class community” because tests serve as feedback to the instructors about students’ general understanding of course material.
“What can happen, if you get rampant academic misconduct in a course, is that it can skew my perception of whether students are really understanding something,” she said. “We move on thinking everyone gets this, but they don’t. And then it snowballs; then you have to keep cheating because you still haven’t learned how to do this sort of thing.”
Both Barber and professor of chemistry and biochemistry Michael Kellman said cheating ultimately undermines students’ learning because success in upper-division courses requires knowledge of the skills learned in the general biology and chemistry sequences.
“Cheating is for losers. Try to be a winner. Don’t be a loser,” Kellman said. “Don’t cheat your way from a C to a C+. Work on the course and get a B and everybody will be better off, everybody will be happier.”
