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Creators/Authors contains: "Recktenwald, Geoffrey"

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  1. null (Ed.)
    In the spring of 2020, universities across America, and the world, abruptly transitioned to online learning. The online transition required faculty to find novel ways to administer assessments and in some cases, for students to utilize novel ways of cheating in their classes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a retrospective on cheating during online exams in the spring of 2020. It specifically looks at honor code violations in a sophomore level engineering course that enrolled more than 200 students. In this particular course, four pre-COVID assessments were given in class and six mid-COVID assessments were given online. This paper examines the increasing rate of cheating on these assessments and the profiles of the students who were engaged in cheating. It compares students who were engaged in violations of the honor code by uploading exam questions vs. those who those who looked at solutions to uploaded questions. This paper also looks at the abuse of Chegg during exams and the responsiveness of Chegg’s honor code team. It discusses the effectiveness of Chegg’s user account data in pursuing academic integrity cases. Information is also provided on the question response times for Chegg tutors in answering exam questions and the actual efficacy of cheating in this fashion. 
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  2. Students achieve functional knowledge retention through active, spaced repetition of concepts through homework, quizzes, and lectures. True knowledge retention is best achieved through proper comprehension of the concept. In the engineering curriculum, courses are sequenced into prerequisite chains of three to five courses per subfield –- a design aimed at developing and reinforcing core concepts over time. Knowledge retention of these prerequisite concepts is important for the next course. In this project, concept review quizzes were used to identify the gaps and deficiencies in students' prerequisite knowledge and measure improvement after a concept review intervention. Two quizzes (pre-intervention and post-intervention) drew inspiration from the standard concept inventories for fundamental concepts and include concepts such as Free Body Diagrams, Contact and Reaction Forces, Equilibrium Equations, and Calculation of the Moment. Concept inventories are typically multiple-choice, in this evaluation the concept questions were open-ended. A clear rubric was created to identify the missing prerequisite concepts in the students' knowledge. These quizzes were deployed in Mechanics of Materials, a second-level course in the engineering mechanics curriculum (the second in a sequence of four courses: Statics, Mechanics of Materials, Mechanical Design, and Kinematic Design). The pre-quiz was administered (unannounced) at the beginning of the class. The class then actively participated in a 30-minute concept review. A different post-quiz was administered in the same class period after the review. Quizzes were graded with a rubric to measure the effect of the concept review intervention on the students’ knowledge demonstration and calculations. The study evaluated four major concepts: free body diagrams, boundary reaction forces (fixed, pin, and contact), equilibrium, and moment calculation. Students showed improvements of up to 39\% in the case of drawing a free body diagram with fixed boundary condition, but continued to struggle with free body diagram involving contact forces. This study was performed at a large public institution in a class size of 240 students. A total of 224 students consented to the use of their data for this study (and attended class on the day of the intervention). The pre-quiz is used to determine the gaps (or deficiencies) in conceptual understanding among students. The post-quiz measures the response to the review and is used to determine which concept deficiencies were significantly improved by the review, and which concept deficiencies were not significantly improved by the concept review. This study presents a concept quiz and associated rubric for measuring student improvement resulting from an in-class intervention (concept review). It quantifies a significant improvement in the students’ retrieval of their prerequisite knowledge after a concept review session. This approach, therefore, has utility for improving knowledge retention in programs with a similar, sequenced course design. 
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