Students' experiences of cheating in the online exam environment

The purpose of this thesis was to produce recommendations to teachers who instruct online courses on how to best instruct courses to mitigate cheating online. The beneficiary was Laurea University of Applied Sciences. They needed someone to investigate this subject, since they are going to start offering students with entire online study opportunities, which are then accompanied with an online degree. The decision was to interview students who have experience from online and in-class studies to able to compare. After a few pre-interviews with students, some problems arose. For instance, online exams can often be done from a remote location, the students are able to cheat by i.e. doing the exam together with someone. These findings helped shape the questionnaire schedule. Eventually, five students were interviewed, and the findings were similar to those of the pre-interviews. Poor quality in online studies, teachers, and feeling connectedness depended mostly on the teachers’ and students’ low engagement. The interviewed students reported various cheating methods, some of which they had used themselves. The most common cheating method was completing the online exam together with peer(s)/friend(s) while searching for answers from the internet and course material. The motivations for cheating were 1) no barrier for cheating and 2) wanting to pass or get higher grades. The teachers did not always define cheating to the students. Two of the students said that if the teacher’ did not define what constitutes as cheating, then there could not be an act that would count as cheating. Therefore, anything goes. The recommendations were 1) teachers define what constitutes as cheating, 2) do not have online exams, instead have weekly essay assignments, since essays require the application of knowledge. If the instructor decides to have online exams then 3) have the online exams in a physical room, 4) more demanding questions, 5) less time to complete the exam, 6) software that prevents internet access, and 7) have the questions drawn randomly from a pool of questions