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Do Online Exams Facilitate Cheating? An Experiment Designed to Separate Possible Cheating from the Effect of the Online Test Taking Environment

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Abstract

Despite recent growth in distance education, there has been relatively little research on whether online examinations facilitate student cheating. The present paper utilizes an experimental design to assess the difference in student performance between students taking a traditional, proctored exam and those taking an online, unproctored exam. This difference in performance is examined in a manner which considers both the effect of the different physical test environments and the possible effect of a difference in the opportunity for students to cheat. This study, utilizing regression models that also account for relevant control variables, examines 44 undergraduate statistics students, finds evidence that the difference in the testing environment creates a disadvantage to students taking the online exam which somewhat offsets the advantage that the unproctored students gain from greater opportunities to cheat.

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Notes

  1. This evidence of high and increasing student cheating prevalence may be the source of even greater apprehension when one considers the evidence presented by Nonis and Swift (2001), Harding et al. (2004), Lawson (2004) and Harper (2006) to the effect that cheating behavior by college students is statistically related to a higher propensity to demonstrate dishonest behavior when such individuals move on to business or professional careers.

  2. The Harmon and Lambrinos (2008) study also made an inference regarding student cheating in online exams by examining how well a regression model (featuring student GPA as an independent variable) explaining student exam scores predicted those exam scores in classes which relied on proctored exams versus classes which utilized online exams.

  3. The original list of variables included in the stepwise regression procedure were: Section Dummy, score on the initial math test, hours employed, hours exercising, hours on the internet, math SAT, verbal SAT, GPA, credits completed, credits attempted, residential status, midterm grade, class attendance, homework grades, measures of procrastination in starting and submitting homework assignments and gender. The stepwise procedure uses partial correlation to determine which variable to add into the model which maximizes the coefficient of determination.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank David Fask for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA

    Alan Fask & Zhaobo Wang

  2. Department of Economics and Finance, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA

    Fred Englander

Authors
  1. Alan Fask
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  2. Fred Englander
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  3. Zhaobo Wang
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Correspondence to Fred Englander.

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Fask, A., Englander, F. & Wang, Z. Do Online Exams Facilitate Cheating? An Experiment Designed to Separate Possible Cheating from the Effect of the Online Test Taking Environment. J Acad Ethics 12, 101–112 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-014-9207-1

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