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POLICY & REFORM
How we can avoid cheating has become an open debate .
What are some other ways to reduce it ? Should we go back to face-to-face exams ? This is a debate . It is an open debate and this is why we are here . Everyone is talking about that . How can cheating be avoided for online assessments ? Online education is a fantastic thing . It gives flexibility but also it has got a lot of opportunities . But there are a lot of challenges associated with it and how to address those challenges especially with academic integrity or academic misconduct . Students are , because they have gotten easy access to information , they ’ re cheating . So how we can avoid cheating in universities has become an open debate . by a live human proctor or it is AI based . These AI based software ’ s can actually flag any suspicious student activities . But there ’ s concern around data privacy at this point . Also as artificial intelligence and technologies continue to advance the data recorded today could be analysed more deeply in different ways by tomorrow .
What are the risks for students if they ’ re caught cheating ? Are these penalties working ? Penalties can range from deduction of marks to revoking of degrees . Having said that , a revoking of a student ’ s degree is the consequence of failing a unit . Penalties differ from losing some marks to failing the course depending on what kind of academic misconduct has been done . So it entirely depends . Students also have the right to file an academic misconduct appeal . If they failed the course , they might come back , do the course and take the degree or do the assessment as required .
In my research it says that they don ’ t care about the potential consequences . No matter how many penalties you impose , they don ’ t care . One of the reasons is there are still number of academic misconduct cases that go undetected . I ’ m not saying that we can detect a hundred percent of academic misconduct cases . That is never going to happen . But if we increase the detection , then we can educate our students about academic misconduct , which is one of the ways to reduce it .
What are the barriers standing in the way of returning to face-to-face exams ? Before the pandemic , universities spoke about a flexible , hybrid blended learning approach . Covid-19 has actually catalysed it and if face-to-face is less flexible for students it is a university ’ s decision which way they want to go . So if they want to return back to face-to-face exams or they would like to have more flexibility given the different cohort of students , they need to ensure all the graduate attributes and learning objectives have been met .
How can universities ensure that students are sticking to their degree requirements and avoid the temptation to cheat ? There are four prongs of academic misconduct . One is educating these students . The second one is to prevent students from engaging in academic misconduct . The third one is detecting it and the fourth is applying the penalty . So , the university needs assess how much education needs to be done about academic misconduct , and universities are doing great things . Students are doing academic misconduct modules , but it has to be reinforced every time they return back to the university after each semester . So preventing that , that is where it comes . The assessments needs to be designed at a higher level . Also ensuring that authentic assessments are being given to students and then detecting what kind of software tools are available . ■
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