The purpose of this quantitative study is to identify the extent of the differences in the frequency and severity of academic misconduct reporting before and after the COVID-19 pandemic at a particular higher education institution in the southwestern United States. The number of case files were tallied for each of the nine semesters preceding the…

Purpose: To improve the academic integrity of online examinations, digital proctoring systems have recently been implemented in higher education institutions (HEIs). The paper aims to understand how digital proctoring has been practised in higher education (HE) and proposes future research directions for studying digital proctoring in HE.…

The shift to online instruction in higher education related to the COVID-19 pandemic has raised worldwide concerns about an increase in academic misconduct (cheating and plagiarism). However, data to document any increase is sparse. For this study, we collected survey data from 484 students in 11 universities in the USA, and 410 students in five…

Academic misconduct is a threat to the validity and reliability of online examinations, and media reports suggest that misconduct spiked dramatically in higher education during the emergency shift to online exams caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study reviewed survey research to determine how common it is for university students to admit…

During the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, one of the primary challenges faced by mathematics educators was maintaining assessment integrity when replacing invigilated assessments with online assessments. These assessments presented students with the opportunity to engage in misconduct in a manner that ordinarily would not exist. This was particularly…

Letter grading systems in education have been widely accepted as a strong medium to assess the educational performance of students across the world. It has been a successful system for many years because it can motivate students to achieve satisfactory grades in a course. However, recent studies indicate that grades can also foster anxiety and…

Purpose: Academic integrity is vital to the success and sustainability of the academic project and particularly critical in the training of ethical and informed health professionals. Yet studies have found that cheating in online exams was commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the increased use of online and blended learning…

The COVID-19 pandemic provoked an urgency for many educators to integrate digital information and communication technologies in their educational practices. We explored how faculty members tackled the task of adapting their assessment practices during the pandemic to identify what is required to sustain and favour future quality development and…

Three decades of concentrated research on the topic of cheating in college has shown that there is no magic bullet to stopping or reducing cheating. The goal of this study was to exam the potential of nudges other than integrity pledges to incentivize, encourage, or entice students to be honest, even when it is easy and advantageous to be…

This pilot study looks at how the author proactively sought to mitigate the issue of cheating when giving online tests during the Spring 2021 semester, at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic forced many teachers around the world to use modalities that involved distance learning. The genesis, implementation and results of the strategy used during the…

In this article we report on a study of higher education students' (N = 256) perceptions on the willingness, pressure, and frequency of their peers to cheat in online assessments at an Australian university in Singapore during the COVID-19 induced Online Teaching and Assessment period (COTA). MANOVA was used to identify the differences in…

Although postsecondary students' rate of academic dishonesty has been consistent over the last 50 years, the most significant increase in cheating has been in unpermitted collaboration. Given the changing learning environments necessitated by COVID-19, this study investigates how 12 college students at a highly selective Research 1 institution…

With the global pandemic educators have had to move their courses to virtual spaces, and this quick change has brought up concerns, especially in STEM education where there are ongoing discussions of adapting laboratories and shifting lecture and assessment practices to online learning. One issue that has become more pressing, beyond the financial…

Globally, academic integrity and misconduct is a continuing conundrum for education institutions. Whilst the online (internet based and remote) delivery of education is not new, the onset of COVID-19 with accompanying health and safety limitations and the consequential rapid transition to emergency online delivery of education has, for many,…

Due to COVID-19, universities with limited expertise with the digital environment had to rapidly transition to online teaching and assessment. This transition did not create a new problem but has offered more opportunities for contract cheating and diversified the types of such services. While universities and lecturers were adjusting to the new…