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In all fairness
The impact of cheating on lecturers and their course programs .
By Emilie Lauer
With the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns , universities have been forced to undertake online examinations which has made it easier for students to cheat .
According to Associate Professor from the University of South Australia Christopher Deneen , students cheating on their exams also affects their lecturers .
“ If the assessment results are tainted , instructors ’ feedback won ’ t hit the mark and won ’ t show student ’ s progression .
“ If each year we can ’ t improve our programs based on how well our students did , then it creates a lot of problems .”
Deneen urges universities to re-distribute the weight of assessments into other forms of tasks that are much more resistant to cheating .
CR : How did the pandemic affect the way we assess students at university ? CD : It had a tremendous effect . People who were already exploring online examinations were in a fairly good position . I think the hardest hit were people who were giving examinations or other forms of assessment in a very traditional manner . And these are people who had
to undertake significant and unexpected changes to assessment , an area of the curriculum that often is quite resistant to change .
We heard a lot of real celebrations , but also a few horror stories too . And some of these centred on some positive innovations and results that came out , but quite a few centred on things like unanticipated problems , systems crashing or students not able to access an online portal to take their exam .
Did the pandemic increase the number of students cheating during exams ? That ’ s the question on everyone ’ s mind . The truth is , I don ’ t think we have a clear picture of that . Certainly it increased our awareness of it . You could say with some certainty that we were forced to confront cheating in ways that we had never been before .
Whatever illusions we may have had about examination were stripped away as a lot of people reported that the scores they were receiving and processing as teachers and markers were radically skewing upward , and they didn ’ t have any way to account for this in terms of improved student achievement .
So did the pandemic increase cheating ? I ’ m not convinced of that , but I am convinced that it certainly made cheating an even more important part of the academic agenda .
How does student cheating impact the lecturer and the academic program ? Assessment is about coming to valid and reliable interpretations of student achievement , and then acting on them . We can loosely assign three categories of action . The first is to promote student learning , and this can involve what we often call assessment for learning : giving good feedback , helping students advance .
The second is to record their learning . That ’ s what examinations are very much about : recording where the student is at , often at a midpoint or a final point in a course .
And finally , we often forget that assessment is also about improving ourselves and how we engage with our learners . So when we talk about the impact of cheating on the instructor and on the program , all of these critical areas are undermined .
When instructors are looking to improve students to give them accurate feedback , if the assessment results that come back to those instructors are tainted , the feedback is often not going to hit the mark .
And similarly , we have to be able to look at the marks we give and say , ‘ I can stand behind these . I can say this mark represents the actual degree of student achievement .’ If we can ’ t we ’ re in pretty big trouble .
We want all of our students to do better over time , but we also want future generations of our students to do well . If we can ’ t improve our programs each year
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