Students were twice as likely to cheat in online exams following the rapid switch to digital assessment last summer, a survey suggests.

A survey of 1,608 students in higher education institutions across Germany found that 61.4 per cent said that they had used ¡°unallowed assistance and/or engaged in direct exchange with other students¡± during online exams over summer 2020.

For on-site exams taken over the same period, 31.7 per cent admitted to this sort of behaviour, according to a .

¡°The overall results speak for the notion that the swift application of ad hoc online testing during 2020 has led to negative consequences for academic integrity,¡± the paper says.

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THE Campus resource: Using fair assessment to tackle the rise in online cheating

Universities were often forced to switch online in a matter of days and ¡°maintaining academic integrity likely often became a secondary priority compared to maintaining some sort of instruction and managing limited resources¡±.

The researchers found that 874 of survey respondents took only on-site exams during the 2020 summer semester; 385 took only online exams and 349 participants took both online and in-person exams.

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Stefan Janke,?an educational psychologist at the University of Mannheim and one of the preprint¡¯s authors, said?¡°the pandemic and the lockdown came very suddenly to all of us. Students were confronted with a new kind of learning environment with which they were not familiar and would have felt additional pressures and stresses.

¡°Online examinations without additional safety procedures may have provided students with the sense that they can cheat without being detected,¡± he added.

Dr Janke said that universities should consider more collaborative approaches to assessment, or setting open-book exams that require internet research, as these may help students to develop skills?that would be highly valued in the workplace.

Thomas Lancaster, a senior teaching fellow at Imperial College London, said that, while the results would need to be confirmed after peer review, they weren¡¯t surprising.

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For Dr Lancaster, the decision to press ahead with online exams last summer so students could complete their studies was the right one but added that ¡°we can certainly learn from the Covid-19 experience¡±.

¡°Students have been under a lot of pressure over the last year. That doesn't excuse cheating, but it should serve as a reminder to the sector that we need to make sure that students feel fully supported and so should not need to resort to taking shortcuts,¡± he said.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com