In response to the rapid, probably unprecedented rise in academic cheating during remote learning, online proctoring companies — companies that record or review or live monitor online exams and assignments — have done quite well. Some reports show their customer bases and service needs expanding five, seven and even nine fold over the past year. That makes sense. The more online courses and tests, the more need to be sure that those tests are being delivered and completed fairly and equitably. Until recently, the connection between cheating prevention and proctoring was merely logical - that the more likely students are to be caught, the less likely they are to cheat. Surprisingly, and despite that obvious logic, there’s been some debate about whether watching people take online exams deters cheating. Now though, in what should be a breakthrough in managing remote learning and promoting academic integrity, research confirms the connection between remote exam proctoring and reduced cheating. Seife Dendir, a professor in the Department of Economics at Radford University and R. Stockton Maxwell, in the Department of Geospatial Science, also at Radford, published a paper in December titled, “Cheating in online courses: Evidence from online proctoring.” It’s as clear as research gets. Their research found that cheating was happening in unproctored online classes. In those situations, cheating was both common and highly rewarding. When a remote proctoring tool was used to watch the exam, cheating went down. They wrote pretty directly that, “some form of direct proctoring is perhaps the most effective way of mitigating cheating during high-stakes online assessments.” No kidding. Even so, the size of the impact came as news, even to the researchers. “Moving from an unproctored to a proctored environment is bound to have some effect, so the results were not totally surprising. The size of the decline in grades with webcam monitoring was somewhat surprising and indicate that educators might have more work to do in guiding online education,” Dendir said. In their test, the Radford team compared identical asynchronous online classes across different disciplines - one set with proctoring and one set without. The system they used was Respondus Monitor, a record-and-review tool that allows professors or other school leaders to review suspicious or unusual activities after a test session - in essence, a security camera approach to exam integrity. “These results parallel what we’ve heard from professors for years – that when they introduce Respondus Monitor to their online courses, the average score on exams drops about one letter grade. However, this is the first time we’ve seen the research done in a scholarly way,” said Jodi Feeney, Chief Operating Officer at Respondus. About the debates around proctoring and preserving integrity during online courses, Feeney added, “While most news articles focus on students who dislike remote proctoring, there is a large contingent of students who favor it because it levels the playing field. Good students get frustrated when other students cheat their way into a good grade – and it compels good students to cheat too.” That mirrors other research from last year showing that when professors or colleges don’t monitor their exams, simply not doing it can invite cheating - not just by pressuring students to keep pace with cheaters, but by sending a message that the test is not important enough to protect. Not proctoring online work can also, by default, send students a message that online courses are not as valuable or as serious as their in-person counterparts. That’s a distinction that can get washed up in the “debate” about online assessment security. “These technologies are not meant to be prohibitive or punitive, rather they are meant to create accountability similar to the in-person classroom,” said Dendir, the Radford professor. “Again, ultimately, online proctoring is just one more step toward creating a level of equivalence between traditional/face-to-face courses – where in-person proctoring is the norm – and online courses,” he said. Making online classes “similar to” or on “a level of equivalence” to face-to-face classes ought to be enough of a reason to monitor exams. But in case it’s not, there are two other big bottom lines about this research. One is that remote exam proctoring in online courses works to reduce cheating. Even though it should be obvious, whatever debate existed about that point, this should help end it. The second is that professors and schools that are teaching online now, which is just about every single one, should heavily weigh the messages they send by not investing in enhanced forms of course integrity. There’s little such thing as too much investment in integrity. In their research, Dendir and Maxwell used “a series of mitigation measures” even before they used proctoring. These included, “the use of a special browser, a restricted testing period, randomized questions and choices, and a strict timer” and students still cheated. In other words, whatever a school is doing to limit cheating, it probably isn’t enough. “We will certainly continue to use the online proctoring for high-stakes exams in our courses,” Dendir said. It certainly seems as though he should, others too. That’s good news for the proctoring companies, even better news for those who don’t want students cheating their way to grades and degrees. Source
