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The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible

During the COVID-19 sanitary crisis, many exams were hastily moved to online mode. This revived a much needed debate over the privacy issues associated with online proctoring of exams, while the validity and fairness of unproctored exams were increasingly questioned. With a randomized control trial,...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Humbert, Marc, Lambin, Xavier, Villard, Eric
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9754663/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2021.100959
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author Humbert, Marc
Lambin, Xavier
Villard, Eric
author_facet Humbert, Marc
Lambin, Xavier
Villard, Eric
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description During the COVID-19 sanitary crisis, many exams were hastily moved to online mode. This revived a much needed debate over the privacy issues associated with online proctoring of exams, while the validity and fairness of unproctored exams were increasingly questioned. With a randomized control trial, we estimate the effectiveness of prior warnings as a means of discouraging academic dishonesty in exams. We use original, non-intrusive technologies to surreptitiously identify cheating in a series of unproctored assignments and send a targeted warning to half of the students who were identified as cheaters. We then compare their cheating behavior on the final exam with the behavior of the group of unwarned cheaters. The warning proves effective but does not completely eliminate cheating, as some students’ cheating strategies become more sophisticated following issuance of the warnings. We conclude that switching traditional exams to online mode should be accompanied by proctoring. When proctoring is not possible, credible and effective anti-cheating technologies should be deployed together with adequate warnings.
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spelling pubmed-97546632022-12-16 The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible Humbert, Marc Lambin, Xavier Villard, Eric Information Economics and Policy Article During the COVID-19 sanitary crisis, many exams were hastily moved to online mode. This revived a much needed debate over the privacy issues associated with online proctoring of exams, while the validity and fairness of unproctored exams were increasingly questioned. With a randomized control trial, we estimate the effectiveness of prior warnings as a means of discouraging academic dishonesty in exams. We use original, non-intrusive technologies to surreptitiously identify cheating in a series of unproctored assignments and send a targeted warning to half of the students who were identified as cheaters. We then compare their cheating behavior on the final exam with the behavior of the group of unwarned cheaters. The warning proves effective but does not completely eliminate cheating, as some students’ cheating strategies become more sophisticated following issuance of the warnings. We conclude that switching traditional exams to online mode should be accompanied by proctoring. When proctoring is not possible, credible and effective anti-cheating technologies should be deployed together with adequate warnings. Elsevier B.V. 2022-03 2021-12-04 /pmc/articles/PMC9754663/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2021.100959 Text en © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Humbert, Marc
Lambin, Xavier
Villard, Eric
The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title_full The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title_fullStr The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title_full_unstemmed The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title_short The role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
title_sort role of prior warnings when cheating is easy and punishment is credible
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9754663/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infoecopol.2021.100959
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