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1. Reconnecting Students and Faculty to Maximize Academic Integrity and Minimize Student Stress in the Virtual Classroom

   https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.00080-22  

   Sonbuchner, Timothy M.; Lee, Jacqueline; Mundorff, Emily C.; Santangelo, Jessica R.; Wei, Sujun; Novick, Peter A. (September 2022, Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education)

   Parks, Samantha T. (Ed.)

   ABSTRACT The article documents faculty experiences with the shift online due to the pandemic and provides recommendations to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instructors. Over 100 faculty members were surveyed on these topics and contrasted with previously reported student experiences. The online shift changed how faculty administered exams, ran courses, and acted to ensure academic integrity. For example, when exams went online, 73% of faculty reported spending more time preventing cheating. Concerning academic integrity and stress, faculty and students agreed with the exception of a few notable disconnects. Students reported greater workloads in online classes, while faculty maintained that the shift online did not change student workloads. Students perceived more online cheating than faculty. Overall, there seems to be a significant disconnect regarding faculty not realizing how much their actions may encourage or discourage cheating. Few faculty (<15%) indicated that being a tough grader or having test times too short is a motivating factor, but over 55% of students reported that these motivate students to cheat. Conversely, over 60% of students reported respect for their professors discourages them from cheating, while only 37% of faculty indicated the same. Over 70% of faculty and students indicated that fear of getting caught is a deterrent to cheating. Recommendations to reconnect include (i) faculty should use the finding that the number one deterrent of cheating is fear of getting caught; and (ii) faculty should maintain students’ respect by being clear or overestimating workload requirements, carefully adjusting time for online exams, and setting clear expectations with uncomplicated exam questions consistent with the material taught. 

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2. Unproctored online exams provide meaningful assessment of student learning

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2302020120  

   Chan, Jason_C K; Ahn, Dahwi (August 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   In the United States, the onset of COVID-19 triggered a nationwide lockdown, which forced many universities to move their primary assessments from invigilated in-person exams to unproctored online exams. This abrupt change occurred midway through the Spring 2020 semester, providing an unprecedented opportunity to investigate whether online exams can provide meaningful assessments of learning relative to in-person exams on a per-student basis. Here, we present data from nearly 2,000 students across 18 courses at a large Midwestern University. Using a meta-analytic approach in which we treated each course as a separate study, we showed that online exams produced scores that highly resembled those from in-person exams at an individual level despite the online exams being unproctored—as demonstrated by a robust correlation between online and in-person exam scores. Moreover, our data showed that cheating was either not widespread or ineffective at boosting scores, and the strong assessment value of online exams was observed regardless of the type of questions asked on the exam, the course level, academic discipline, or class size. We conclude that online exams, even when unproctored, are a viable assessment tool. 

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3. Oral exams for large-enrollment engineering courses to promote academic integrity and student engagement during remote instruction

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637124  

   Lubarda, M.; Delson, N.; Schurgers, C.; Ghazinejad, M.; Baghdadchi, S.; Phan, A.; Minnes, M.; Relaford-Doyle, J.; Klement, L.; Sandoval, C; et al (October 2021, 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   This work-in-progress paper presents an innovative practice of using oral exams to maintain academic integrity and promote student engagement in large-enrollment engineering courses during remote instruction. With the abrupt and widespread transition to distance learning and assessment brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a registered upsurge in academic integrity violations globally. To address the challenge of compromised integrity, in the winter quarter of 2021 we have implemented oral exams across six mostly high-enrollment mechanical and electrical engineering undergraduate courses. We present our oral exam design parameters in each of the courses and discuss how oral exams relate to academic integrity, student engagement, stress, and implicit bias. We also address the challenge of scalability, as most of our oral exams were implemented in large classes, where academic integrity and student-instructor disconnection have generally gotten disproportionately worse during remote learning. Our survey results indicate that oral exams have positively contributed to academic integrity in our courses. Based on our preliminary study and experiences, we expect oral exams can be effectively leveraged to hinder cheating and foster academic honesty in students, even when in-person instruction and assessment resumes. 

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4. Data-Driven Investigation into Variants of Code Writing Questions

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET49119.2020.9206195  

   Butler, Liia; Challen, Geoffrey; Xie, Tao (November 2020, 2020 IEEE 32nd Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training)

   null (Ed.)

   To defend against collaborative cheating in code writing questions, instructors of courses with online, asynchronous exams can use the strategy of question variants. These question variants are manually written questions to be selected at random during exam time to assess the same learning goal. In order to create these variants, currently the instructors have to rely on intuition to accomplish the competing goals of ensuring that variants are different enough to defend against collaborative cheating, and yet similar enough where students are assessed fairly. In this paper, we propose data-driven investigation into these variants. We apply our data-driven investigation into a dataset of three midterm exams from a large introductory programming course. Our results show that (1) observable inequalities of student performance exist between variants and (2) these differences are not just limited to score. Our results also show that the information gathered from our data-driven investigation can be used to provide recommendations for improving design of future variants. 

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5. Examining the Examiners: Students' Privacy and Security Perceptions of Online Proctoring Services

   Balash, David G.; Kim, Dongkun; Shaibekova, Darika; Fainchtein, Rahel A.; Sherr, Micah; Aviv, Adam J. (August 2021, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security)

   In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, educational institutions quickly transitioned to remote learning. The problem of how to perform student assessment in an online environment has become increasingly relevant, leading many institutions and educators to turn to online proctoring services to administer remote exams. These services employ various student monitoring methods to curb cheating, including restricted ("lockdown") browser modes, video/screen monitoring, local network traffic analysis, and eye tracking. In this paper, we explore the security and privacy perceptions of the student test-takers being proctored. We analyze user reviews of proctoring services' browser extensions and subsequently perform an online survey (n=102). Our findings indicate that participants are concerned about both the amount and the personal nature of the information shared with the exam proctoring companies. However, many participants also recognize a trade-off between pandemic safety concerns and the arguably invasive means by which proctoring services ensure exam integrity. Our findings also suggest that institutional power dynamics and students' trust in their institutions may dissuade students' opposition to remote proctoring. 

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