By Briana Mutlu
Before the transition to virtual instruction, exam day was something of a ritual. Students would nervously usher into classrooms, and professors would perch themselves in the front, keeping a sharp eye out for any questionable behavior.
Now, students sit alone in front of a screen, with the whole world wide web tempting them to cheat.
“Yeah, I cheated,” said Brian, a film major who graduated from Long Beach State in 2020. “I’d copy and paste answers and send it to friends, mostly discussion posts. It was just way easier to cheat and pass classes during Zoom meetings.”
“Especially for film we had color correction classes and we had partners so there were a bunch of people who just didn’t do it. I did it and I’d send them the video file. We could just send all the files over to each other and we’d all get the same grade whether it was good or bad.”
Since the transition to online schooling and examinations, CSULB along with other universities nationwide have seen an increase in cheating.
Zion Smith, associate director of CSULB’s Office of Student Conduct and Development, said the department “has seen an increase in a variety of academic integrity issues since moving to remote instruction in March.”
During the fall 2019 semester, the department documented 37 cases of academic dishonesty reported by faculty. Fall 2020 has seen 45 cases of academic dishonesty, a 17% increase from last year, according to Patience D. Bryant, director of the student conduct office.
“We have been working with departments and colleges to provide students with resources to help prevent them from violating our academic integrity policy,” Smith said.
It may be difficult to accurately quantify the number of academic dishonesty due to the difficulty of determining whether students are cheating or not.
Robert, a second-year business management major, said he learns less now because “it’s so easy to cheat.”
“I just do it literally all the time, on assignments and tests,” he said.
Robert said he has never been caught cheating and that prior to going online he had never cheated in during his college career.
Research conducted by the National College Testing Association found that online courses face the most academic dishonesty, with over 70% of students admitting to cheating. The association wrote, “In no situation is an institution more vulnerable to scandal and controversy related to academic dishonesty than in online education.”
Will Murray, professor and chair of CSULB’s mathematics department, said he believes that the increase in academic dishonesty is not as insidious as it may seem. He feels that there are “more misunderstandings than hardcore academic dishonesty.”
“If we just quantify it, if we look at how many instances of academic dishonesty there have been since we’ve gone online, I think it’s definitely gone up,” Murray said. “If we look at qualitative aspects of it, like ‘is it increasing’ as a phenomenon, I don’t think so…students don’t understand what professors classify as cheating.”
Murray feels that professors and students have significantly different opinions of considered cheating.
According to the NCTA, “the biggest concern is the extent to which students are aware of what constitutes dishonest behaviors,” and one third of participants reported that “they were unaware they participated in academic dishonesty.”
“I think students want to be honest and have a commitment to academic integrity, but that gets undermined by this high-pressure situation,” Murray said. “If we put people under pressure, they are going to respond in human ways.”
A memorandum issued by Alison Wrynn, the vice chancellor of the California State University system, on Aug. 4 urged faculty and staff to consider using alternate forms of assessment for their students rather than traditional exams, such as open book or open note tests, portfolios and presentations.
According to the memorandum, professors and faculty should take into account students’ possible financial instability and lack of privacy at home. It also gave a list of resources pointing to other universities that have shifted their mode of assessments to accommodate online schooling.
Online exam proctoring has posed several problems across the education system, including privacy issues with online proctoring tools like ProctorU or Respondus. Although professors at CSULB cannot require students to use their cameras, many still ask their students to do so.
“My accounting professor makes us keep our camera on our face and uses a lockdown browser, but I still cheat and use sticky notes on my laptop,” Robert said. “Professors aren’t allowed to force us to have the camera on, but she still enforces it after we told her that.”
Other California universities have expressed concern over online proctoring, for instance University of California, Berkeley has banned all online proctoring, citing privacy issues and unreliable WiFi as making the technology impractical.
Associate professor Paul Sun, who has been at CSULB for four years, said he believes cheating is not a serious problem on campus and that his exams still reflect student learning.
“I take some measures to minimize cheating,” Sun said. “I spread out exams, make them smaller but more frequent to grade evenly. I think that discourages students from cheating, but I don’t enforce use of cameras for exams because I don’t want to put a lot of pressure on the students.”
Wrynn’s statement provided a link to an article about rethinking final exams during the online semester, suggesting an alternative approach that requires students to create concept maps.
“I’ll definitely keep on cheating,” Robert said. “The methods of cheating got way better now that classes are online.”
