Academic dishonesty and monitoring in online exams: a randomized field experiment

Abstract

Cheating in online exams without face-to-face proctoring has been a general concern for academic instructors during the crisis caused by COVID-19. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the cost of these dishonest practices by comparing the academic performance of webcam-proctored students and their unproctored peers in an online gradable test. With this aim in mind, we carried out a randomized feld experiment using a simple video surveillance system through Google Meet during an online closed-book fnal exam of an Introduction to Microeconomics course. Given that all conditions except for webcam monitoring were identical, diferences in between-subjects scores are attributed to academic dishonesty. After controlling for potential confounding factors, including gender, academic degree, instructor, previous score and whether students were repeaters or not, we found that those students who were proctored via webcam obtained statistically signifcant lower scores in the fnal exam than those who were not using this surveillance system with a low level of invasiveness. Inspection of the potential factors behind these diferences in scores suggests that the poorer performance of proctored students is more related to academic dishonesty than to reasons involving anxiety or heterogeneity factors.