Despite opportunities to cheat, unsupervised online exams gauge student learning comparably to in-person exams

Online exams can accurately evaluate student learning without the need for supervision, according to a study published in July 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study analyzed exam scores from nearly 2,000 students at a public university in the Midwest. The researchers compared the scores of in-person exams from the first half of the spring semester of 2020 to online exams taught by the same instructor for the second half of the semester.

The data revealed a strong correlation between the scores of unsupervised online exams and supervised in-person exams. In other words, students who performed well on in-person exams also achieved high scores on online exams.

The study also investigated whether factors such as the students’ college year, course discipline, class size, or question type affected the accuracy of online exams. However, none of these factors significantly impacted the assessment of student learning.

The researchers further examined the data to determine if there were signs of cheating during online exams. They hypothesized that students who had performed poorly on in-person exams would have a significant increase in their scores on online exams if they resorted to cheating. However, the study found no evidence supporting this type of cheating.

These findings are significant because there is a common perception that online exams are prone to cheating. A recent survey showed that 70% of college faculty believed cheating to be a significant issue in online exams, compared to only 8% for in-person exams.

Why it matters

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of online teaching and assessments. Therefore, it is crucial to determine whether unsupervised online exams can effectively assess student learning.

Previous studies have shown that students tend to score higher on online exams compared to in-person exams, which has raised concerns about cheating. However, in order to accurately assess learning, it is essential to demonstrate that students who perform well on in-person exams also excel in online exams, and vice versa. The current study successfully achieved this ranking similarity between the two exam formats.

What’s next

While the data from this study suggests that online exams, even when unproctored, can accurately evaluate student learning on a broad scale, it is important to exercise caution when drawing general conclusions as the study was conducted at a single university.

Furthermore, the landscape of online education has rapidly evolved with the introduction of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which may facilitate cheating. Future research should aim to obtain a larger and more diverse dataset to validate the findings beyond a single institution.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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