https://www.col.org/news/registration-open-for-on-authentic-assessment-for-online-learning/
This question appeared in the MOOC forum today: “What is the best practice in curbing academic dishonesty among undergraduate students in higher institutions?”
There are at least 3 different answers to this. The first answer is we don’t know. Students commit academic integrity violations for lots of different reasons. For some, they worry they will not be able to achieve the reward they desire on their own merits; for some, cheating provides a thrill. To know what would curb academic dishonesty, we would need to know that a student was going to cheat or be dishonest but didn’t because we intervened somehow and our intervention was successful in changing their mind and behaviour. Establishing this causal chain of evidence is very difficult research. If we actually knew what worked, postsecondary institutions around the world would be in a much better place.
The second and most prominent approach involves telling students what academic integrity is, providing examples, and then telling them that if they commit an academic integrity violation and get caught, they will be punished severely. The most dominant method is punitive and threatening. This is the path of increased surveillance and the technological arms race where students get more creative in their approaches, including hacking institutional IT systems to change a grade or steal the final exam. Do a Google search for "how to cheat Respondus Monitor" or "how to cheat Proctorio." If we build a jail, there will always be someone thinking about how to escape.
The best practice, and the one this course advocates for, is the third way to answer this question. The best way to curb academic dishonesty is to create relevant and engaging learning tasks that connect with a learner’s motivation and goals. Different cultural conceptions of textual ownership, copyright, language, and educational systems all come into play when discussing academic integrity, but all students have ethical beliefs and learning goals, and if the assessments we design ask students to engage in meaningful tasks they care about, they are less likely to act in a dishonest fashion. Students are more likely to cheat in less personalized, less task-oriented learning environments. By creating more personalize and more task-oriented learning environments, authentic assessments can appeal to students’ higher natures.
Technology cannot stop academic dishonesty. Authentic assessments will not put an end to cheating. But they can help by changing the nature of the game.