A second screen, WhatsApp, Wikipedia
Cheating during exams? Prove it!
It always made him feel like an idiot. He’d be grading one of his accountancy exams only to find the same types of answers using the same exact words. He knew people had cheated. But would he report this to the exam committee?
Accountancy & internal control lecturer Jeroen Kuper shakes his head. No.
After all, reporting it would be useless. The answers differed just enough from each other that the plagiarism programme didn’t see them. But that doesn’t mean nothing happened. ‘You can see their eyes moving all over the place during exams’, Kuper says of proctoring online exams. ‘The only thing they’re not looking at is the screen with the actual exam on it. That’s how you can tell that they’re talking to each other.’
Second screen
It’s just one of the many forms of cheating he’s encountered in the two years that exams have moved online due to the Covid pandemic. Students use extra screens in addition to the one they use for their exam. After all, the university won’t be able to see that second screen, not even when students have to switch their webcam on. What are on those extra screens? WhatsApp, Wikipedia, or summaries of textbooks.
You can see their eyes moving all over the place during exams
He also realised people were cheating due to the low number of students that showed up to discuss the exams. ‘Why would they? The success rate was really high.’ Sometimes he’d interrogate a student who’d failed, asking them what happened. ‘The student, usually a female one, always says they don’t want to participate.’
A quick investigation by UKrant showed that the number of cheating cases reported to the exam committee skyrocketed from 241 in 2018/2019 to 749 in 2020/2021.
At the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, the number of reports went from four in 2018/2019 to eight in 2019/2020, and then shot up to sixty-four in 2020/2021. The law department saw its number of suspected cases triple to twenty in 2018/2019 – the number of reports is unknown. During the pandemic years, sixty-three and forty-one cases were reported. The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) went from approximately thirty-seven cases to 191. All faculties saw a rise in cheating cases.
Invalid
The microeconomics course at FEB was declared invalid because the students texted each other during the exam. The exam committee punished forty-seven students. Two other big exams during the same block were also declared invalid, after students cheated via WhatsApp during psychology statistics and criminal law exams.
But these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. Suspecting cheating, no matter how well-founded, isn’t enough. The point is to be able to prove it to the exam committee. That’s why Kuper didn’t report any of the cases he encountered. At the law department, the board of appeal for examinations told the exam committee to back off a few times: Do lecturers only think they’ve seen students cheat, or can they actually prove it?
The numbers are only the tip of the iceberg
Only 475 of the 811 cases in 2020/2021 were actually found to be legitimate, and for good reason. A font change does not proof of cheating make. Nor does a student writing the answer to one question in the space for another. Sociology department exam committee chair Rudi Wielers isn’t proud, therefore, of the fact that he’s clocked zero cases of cheating over the past two years. ‘We don’t actually think no one has been cheating’, he says. ‘We’re certain students work together, we just don’t know on what scale.’
The exam committee therefore decided early on that detecting cheating wouldn’t solve the problem. ‘The software isn’t properly equipped to do so and it negatively affects students who aren’t looking to cheat on their exam. It also became clear that we wouldn’t be able to legally prove that people had cheated on online exams.’
That’s why the Central Exam Committee recently said it didn’t want to administer online exams anymore because of the risk of cheating, even though UG spokesperson Anja Hulshof said ‘technological resources’ had reduced students’ ability to cheat after the first block. ‘We use logging to track whether someone copies a large number of words in one go, which would be suspicious’, she says.
Disaster
Economics lecturer Marco Haan, whose entire exam was declared invalid, is doing everything he can to prevent this disaster from happening again. One strategy is to only administer multiple-choice exams. He also gives students so little time that they can’t talk to each other in an effort to cheat.
But none of this makes the exams any better. Any logical structure was lost. The pressure to perform under the penalty of time didn’t help students one bit. Besides all that, it didn’t even fully eliminate cheating.
It’s suspicious if someone copies a large number of words in one go
And so students had to photograph their student IDs next to handwritten answers to not only prove they were theirs, but also that they were who they said they were. Proctors asked control questions afterwards. ‘But what if a student doesn’t know the answer to begin with? Does that mean you’ve proven that they cheated?’ Haan wonders.
In the meantime, students came up with new tricks. Kuper’s honest students would tell him how their fellow students would form groups of five or six people, just small enough to prevent people from telling on them. Together, they’d prepare for the exam.
‘They each learn part of the material. When it’s time for the exam, they divide the questions among them, each student taking on the question about the section they studied. Together, they write the perfect exam. They each only have to focus on one question, and they simply change the wording a little for each submission. The software doesn’t pick up on it, but I do.’
Unique exam
Statistics lecturer Edith van Krimpen-Stoop at the psychology department also witnessed large-scale cheating at an exam she created. She doesn’t think it helped her students very much; she’d changed the sums beforehand, rendering cheating pretty useless.
She spent entire vacations creating her exams like this. Even then, she’s not 100 percent sure that nothing happened. ‘Honestly’, she says, ‘I’ve tried to let it go, because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. The only thing I can do is make a unique exam for every single student.’
At the same time, many lecturers are worried. What can they do, knowing cheating is rampant at the university? Kuper wrote a concerned letter to Manda Broekhuizen, his faculty’s vice-dean.
He felt conned, he said, because he didn’t see people’s individual efforts when grading exams. ‘But what’s much worse is that I’m part of this fraudulent process that ultimately leads to people being awarded a master’s degree that they don’t deserve’, he wrote.
It’s much worse that I’m part of a fraudulent process
Besides, he teaches accountancy. And accountants are ‘the confidential advisors of the financial world. They need a clear moral compass and champion ethics. I can’t stand the fact that there will be a whole group of new accountants entering the field who came by their degrees fraudulently, and that I participated in that as a lecturer.’
Lose value
‘Many lecturers are worried that diplomas will lose their value because of online exams, because there’s a higher risk of cheating’, says spokesperson Anja Hulshof.
But the biggest question remains what can be done about it. For now, it seems the best way is a return to on-site exams at the Aletta Jacobs hall. That was the solution the uni came up with last December, although Van Krimpen-Stoop ended up sacrificing her Christmas vacation after all when Covid infection rates prevented it from actually happening.
Haan also thinks on-site exams are the best solution. Cheating is as old as the day is long, but he thinks students are less likely to cheat sitting a real-life exam in the Aletta Jacobs hall.
But Kuper thinks that notion is outdated, and just a little bit short-sighted. Increased oversight, proctoring, time-sensitive questions; none of it works. ‘We just keep doing the same things’, he says. ‘The university should prepare for a world in which we can administer online exams safely.’
Because who’s to say this Omicron variant won’t be followed by an even more aggressive Sigma? Or a Tau? After all, this isn’t the first time we thought the pandemic was over. Plus, he says, we’ve had the know-how for a while now. ‘Look at online universities’, he says. ‘They have the tools to do so, because they need to administer exams on a university level.’
Another advantage of online universities is that students can take exams whenever they’re ready to do so. Kuper thinks that would be great for his students, too. ‘I’d love to just be able to put all the questions on the online platform. That way students can just decide to take the exam instead of taking all the classes. That’s fine, it’s entirely up to them.’
Will the university actually explore the option? He doesn’t think so. ‘We all want to return to a brick-and-mortar university, and we’re only coming up with brick-and-mortar solutions.’