Strategies to Address Cheating in Online Exams

Abstract

This is a descriptive study to investigate one of the most critical issues faced by teachers in evaluating their students’ performance at the university level during COVID-19. It aimed to specify the exams’ problems faced by the Jordanian universities’ teaching staff members, and the strategies they used to face cheating by their students in online exams. The researchers built a questionnaire of 33 items under (3) main headings, and sent by email to a random sample of 120 out of 995 teaching staff members in two Jordanian universities, University of Jordan and Arab Open University/ Jordan, in the academic year 2020/2021. The study revealed that most of the staff members faced a number of problems, especially with the effort needed for the preparation of online exams, and the advanced ways of cheating being used by their students. It also showed that they used several strategies to face those problems such as open-ended questions to assess knowledge achievement, and project application to assess students’ skills, as well as using cameras to control exams monitoring.