Academic Integrity during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

An online learning environment can be effective but presents additional challenges with regard to academic integrity compared to in-person education. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many institutions to an online learning environment with less than two weeks' notice. Even before migrating to the online learning environment, violations of academic integrity have been shown to be alarmingly prevalent in United States institutions. In an online environment where students have unfettered access to online resources, “availability” would be expected to be a substantial factor making cheating easier and, thus, more prevalent. The goal of this research is to analyze student perceptions of adherence to academic integrity rules before and after the initial COVID-19 response in Spring 2020, where classes were forced to an online learning environment. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our university made a sudden shift from fully in-person instruction to entirely remote online learning with less than two weeks' notice to both students and faculty. This sudden shift left faculty scrambling to convert in-person lectures, which relied heavily on chalkboards and document cameras as the interface to communicate to students in the classroom, to an entirely online format using only computers from home. The faculty decided to survey the students to obtain their perspective to determine if students felt that they and their peers would adhere to academic integrity rules during this change to an online learning environment. Student surveys were administered during the first and last week of the change from in-person to online instruction for 12 engineering classes at an undergraduate institution, including civil, mechanical, electrical, and general engineering classes. Paired t-tests were performed to determine if students initially felt others would, and afterward did, adhere to academic integrity rules. Results indicate that while students had a positive perception of themselves adhering to academic integrity rules they did not feel that their peers would - with a statistically significant difference. These results are concerning since students may be more predisposed to cheat if they feel they are at a disadvantage because others are cheating. Also, grades are not an adequate assessment of learning objectives being met if students are not adhering to academic integrity requirements. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.