Collegiate online cheating, a predictable result of COVID-19, may threaten the workplace

"Oh, Dr. Peyton, I don’t know why I did it,” sobbed Tammy, the undergrad business major on the other end of the phone call. “I had an A going into your exam yesterday. … I didn’t even need to cheat.” Tammy was sobbing again. “Everybody else was doing it, and it was so easy.” More sobbing. “I’ve never done anything like this before … never.”

Tammy wasn’t alone in cheating on the exam in the junior-level course at a university in Texas during the pandemic. Tammy described how students would attempt to mount smartphones above their monitors so their eye movements might not arouse suspicion with the proctoring service watching the test-takers. Then another student would send answers to their phones.

This case (with names changed) was only one of thousands of online cheating incidents that occurred at universities worldwide since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. As higher-ed rushed to move classes online, it was predictable that cheating would occur. The situation had all three elements of the classic Fraud Triangle: perceived opportunity, perceived unshareable financial need (motive) and rationalization.

Opportunity

In a typical in-person classroom, exams are usually administered under the watchful eye of the instructor. The shift to online instruction because of COVID meant examinations went online, too. Students were accessing exams from their apartments, dorm rooms, or parents’ or friends’ homes in nearby or distant areas.

Prevention and detection of cheating in online tests are dramatically different from in-person exams. Instructors might monitor test-taking for their online courses in real time via a meeting service such as Zoom. Alternatively, their universities might contract with third-party proctoring services. Organizations that issue professional credentials and certificates also use these services. (The ACFE, for example, has recently partnered with test management company Prometric for those who wish to take the CFE Exam remotely. See the September/October 2021 ACFE News article.)

During the 15 years before the outbreak of COVID-19, proctoring services experienced exponential growth as online college courses increased annually. That trend is expected to continue. The proctoring market is projected to be valued at $1.187 billion by 2027, up from a market valuation of $354.37 million in 2019, according to a recent report by Research and Markets. (See “Online Exam Proctoring Market Forecast to 2027 - COVID-19 Impact and Global Analysis by Type,” Research and Markets, Dec. 2020.)

Commercial services might use live proctors, and they might flag students suspected of cheating. Alternatively, services might record videos of exam sessions, and the instructors later review the recordings to try to identify suspected cheating. Regardless of proctoring methods, some students are exploring ways to outmaneuver controls, including unauthorized use of smartphones or other devices to access answers during exams. Other students could obtain test answers via Microsoft’s GroupMe or Snapchat or from one of several commercial sites that advertise their firm’s “study help” but that also, without permission, publish exam questions from instructors’ previous exams and copyrighted test banks.

In-person students often are required to provide their university photo IDs prior to taking exams. Instructors may try to replicate that procedure for online exams by asking students to hold up their IDs to their cameras. However, that procedure can be prone to error if not done correctly.

Motivation (perceived need or pressure)

Generally, it would seem the motivation to cheat during online exams would be the same as for in-person tests: getting higher grades to try to increase the chances of landing a good job or retaining scholarships or other financial aid.

COVID might have exacerbated financial pressure because many college students and their families lost jobs and income. The National Center for Education Statistics estimated that pre-pandemic 75% or more of first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undergraduate students in the U.S. received some form of financial aid. (See “Fast Facts – Financial aid,” U.S. National Center for Education Statistics.) Conservatively, the cost of tuition and fees for an academic year might begin at $15,000 at a public university and be double or triple that at private institutions with an equal amount required for room and board.

Stress that originates from remote learning (and testing) environments might cause students to lose confidence in themselves and feel they must cheat to do well on exams. Even top-notch students may be tempted to cheat because they feel pressure to level the playing field if they believe other students are cheating, and they don’t want their grades to be lower than the cheaters’.

Academically strong students might be motivated to provide unauthorized assistance to classmates because they empathize with their struggles in online courses and testing challenges. One such talented student, whom we’ll call Andrew, wrote an exceptional answer to a computer programming question. Yet, three other less-gifted students submitted the same impressive answer that Andrew had written on his exam. The professor knew which student to schedule first for a Zoom call about the matching answers. “I know you wrote this answer, but who else did you share it with?” the professor asked. Andrew groaned. “Well, there was this girl, and she was so sad about how much trouble she was having with her online classes …” The girl had shared Andrew’s answer with two of her friends.

Rationalization

Just as white-collar crime perpetrators rationalize to convince themselves it’s acceptable to commit fraud, so do students who commit academic dishonesty. Fraud perpetrators might excuse their misbehavior because they feel management passed them over for promotions, they were underpaid or they saw other employees padding expense reimbursements. Some reasons students gave for cheating online during the pandemic have been similar to what instructors hear in face-to-face classes: “Everybody’s doing it” or “I thought I’d try it just once.”

However, some of the unique circumstances caused by COVID and resulting online testing have provided an additional rationalization for cheating. Chief among these is the “distance” of distance learning. Online, it’s not as easy to create respect and trust between instructors and students. The diminished personal connections might lead some students to feel invisible and less loyal to instructors and classmates. This may have been particularly true for classes in which commercial services were the proctors, and instructors weren’t online during exams.

Some students might think instructors are conducting classes online because it’s easier for them or, possibly, they don’t care about their students’ success. Social distancing might also have isolated students from their friends, making them question what they want from their college experiences. That could lead to rationalizing, “This whole situation stinks. I don’t want to be taking online classes. Getting a good grade is what I deserve for what I’m going through, even if I have to cheat to get it.”

Rationalization seemed evident when Texas A&M University faculty members in December 2020 found many students in a finance course had accessed a commercial “study help” website to obtain answers for an exam. One student in the course said instructors should’ve explicitly said they prohibited such sources. Another student said instructors should’ve found the cheating sooner. (See “Texas A&M investigating ‘large scale’ cheating case as universities see more academic misconduct in era of online classes,” by Kate McGee, Texas Tribune, Dec. 16, 2020.)

Widespread access to information on the web has caused confusion for some students as to what is and isn’t cheating. Some students think information found on the web is acceptable to use for papers, without citation, or for obtaining answers to an exam. This may be partially due to the free-for-all sharing mentality of the “Napster effect.” (Napster was the MP3-sharing service that ran into copyright problems in the early 2000s.) Faculty need to provide clear, written instructions to students that accessing information from the web during class doesn’t automatically mean it’s acceptable to do so for exams.

Many faculty members and academic administrators likely anticipated a surge in cheating when classes moved so quickly to online delivery in spring 2020. Yet while they implemented some controls to minimize cheating, we still have much to learn about how to prevent and detect these activities, which have grown into a worldwide phenomenon. (Visit Fraud-Magazine.com for other cases of online cheating across the globe.)

Prevention and detection

CFEs may be called upon to investigate specific instances of online cheating to detect whether a fraud occurred, but a large-scale approach seems to be in order now. In previous years, collegiate internal auditors might have included academic dishonesty as part of their risk assessments for developing each year’s audit plans. It likely ranked low for risk and wasn’t audited.

With the prevalence of COVID-related online cheating and the strong likelihood of reputational risk, we suggest this year’s audit plans include online exam integrity. Key elements for an audit plan can include institutional policies and procedures, assigned responsibilities for policy administration, specified repercussions for violations, adjudication procedures and reporting mechanisms. Each university should have a policy that designates a team, including technology experts, to review allegations and evidence of suspected online cheating. A tip line for students and others to report academic dishonesty is critical just as private-sector hotlines are for reports of occupational fraud. Encouraging students to report any concerns they have about cheating will enable instructors and administrators to design controls and policies to both detect and prevent academic fraud.

[See sidebar: "Investigating Online Cheating".] 

Fraud examiners can perform data analytics to find anomalies via most classroom management software. These applications record logs of the times that students sign on and off for exams and the time they spent on exam questions. Involve technical experts from the software vendor(s) to assure you’re interpreting the data correctly. Data analytics helped Texas A&M faculty identify students suspected of cheating during the online finance exam. Some of the cheaters answered in a shorter time than was required to read the questions. (See the Texas Tribune article.)

The use of technology arguably can get close to crossing ethical lines. Instructors and students have criticized proctoring services for how they might use artificial intelligence and other technologies. For instance, AI can evaluate students’ keystrokes or “gaze detection” to determine when students look away from monitors. Some AI programs use facial recognition. Such methods have led some university students to file petitions protesting the use of proctoring services, and some instructors agree with their concerns. (See “Paranoia About Cheating is Making Online Education Terrible for Everyone,” by Rebecca Heilwell, Vox Recode, May 4, 2020.)

Just as white-collar crime perpetrators rationalize to convince themselves it's acceptable to commit fraud, so do students who commit academic dishonesty.

Even so, these examples give credence to the importance of training faculty on classroom technology and acknowledging the likelihood of cheating in the online testing environment. Instructors might not want to think their students would cheat — “Not in my class. Surely they wouldn’t.” Frequently, some business owners and managers had the same attitude before they learned employees had defrauded them.

Instructors might struggle to “think like a cheater” to try to deter online academic dishonesty. Collaboration with colleagues, reading articles, attending workshops and training can provide insights about the myriad of cheating methods. A simple example is that of students saying they’re reciting exam questions out loud because it helped them analyze test questions. Yet they might be either giving or receiving answers to/from someone else within earshot. Other students might use earbuds to receive answers from off-camera helpers.

A legitimate proctoring service discovered an unusual scheme in early 2020. More than three dozen students in a class who were scheduled to take an exam went to a “tutoring” office. The site was equipped to allow all the students to share their screens, connected via a 20-foot cable to a “tutor” in another room. The students stared into their screens as if they were taking the exam while the tutor in the next room provided the exam answers. (See “A 20-Foot Cable and The Explosion Of Online Cheating,” by Derek Newton, Forbes, April 5, 2020.)

The CEO of the legitimate proctoring service that discovered the cheating contrasted such high-tech methods to the good-old low-tech days when online exam takers might hide helpers under a blanket beneath their desks. Instructors must realize that students who intend to cheat now have considerable technology to help them accomplish their deception.

Preparation and planned response

University policies commonly prescribe expectations for academic integrity in student honor codes. Generally, these require instructors to report concerns about academic cheating to department chairs and up the chain of command to deans and provosts. However, administrators probably wrote such policies prior to the pandemic and likely assumed isolated incidents of cheating.

They couldn’t have anticipated the widespread cheating that resulted when classes and testing went online because of COVID. Just as with occupational-fraud cases, investigating far-reaching higher-education incidents can be challenging because the full extent of the academic fraud may not be known initially.

Universities should establish response protocols in advance of such incidents, including the composition of multifunctional teams. Each team should include the faculty member(s) who identified the concern(s), technical staff who thoroughly understand the testing software, student affairs staff and, possibly, the university attorney. Involvement of additional IT professionals from the testing-platform vendor may also be needed as a resource. Just as you would do for other fraud risks, plan in advance for the possibility of and response to widespread online cheating.

Longer-term consequences

Pervasive academic dishonesty can have severe consequences for educational institutions, hiring managers/recruiters, and for the global economy. At the university level, a cheating scandal might cause serious reputational damage that could lead to decreased student enrollment, less successful faculty recruiting and reduced donor support. The same holds true for erroneously accusing students of online cheating as recently happened at the Dartmouth School of Medicine. (See “Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School,” by Natasha Singer and Aaron Krolik, The New York Times, May 9, and “Geisel dismisses academic honor code charges against 17 students accused of cheating,” by Mike Hanrahan, The Dartmouth, June 11.)

Some hiring managers/recruiters may now be considering whether the prolonged remote learning necessitated by COVID has adversely affected students’ technical knowledge. They should also be questioning whether it has impacted prospective employees’ moral compasses and whether that impact might be short- or long-term.

Graduates who earned a degree by cheating may assume fraudulent shortcuts are an accepted way of doing business. When they enter the workforce, they might continue that conduct. This could result in taking shortcuts on work assignments or might escalate to more serious behavior that would put them in the category of occupational fraudsters.

Even if college cheaters don’t become workplace fraudsters, they’ll enter their first jobs less prepared. Their employers might need to spend time and money training them on the technical aspects of their jobs. Employers may also need to invest more in ethics training and fraud prevention and detection programs. CFEs can give a heads-up to their human resources departments and hiring managers to be aware of the dramatic increase in online cheating resulting from COVID. Now’s a good time to review your corporate code of conduct to ensure the wording is clear as to what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, particularly when it comes to using someone else’s work.

CFEs can help focus students’ understanding of the professional expectations for ethics and integrity in the workplace through workshops and presentations. You can volunteer to be a guest speaker and work with ACFE student chapters and other student organizations to discuss the issues of cheating and its serious consequences. Good topics for discussion are the ACFE’s Code of Ethics and the March/April 2003 Fraud Magazine article “Rewards of Dishonesty,” by ACFE Founder and Chairman Joseph T. Wells, CFE, CPA, which contains timeless lessons about the ACFE’s perspective on unethical conduct.

As with white-collar crime, deterrence of academic cheating requires the appropriate tone at the top. Higher-ed institutions must send a strong message that academic fraud is unacceptable and must discipline students who commit academic dishonesty. The common practice of posting honor codes (codes of conduct) on the web and in course syllabi is essential.

Honor code requirements should be an integral part of student orientation, and faculty and staff orientation sessions. Some U.S. states have mandated risk-management training for student organizations and faculty advisors, covering such topics as alcohol and illegal drugs, hazing, sexual abuse and harassment, fire and safety issues, and travel. Generally, these are focused on the physical health and safety of students. It may be time to implement institutional policies that require more extensive training programs about honor codes. CFEs working in academia could be instrumental in providing insights for the development and administration of such policies.

Online cheating isn’t a one-off concern that will go away after universities return to holding most classes in person. Distance education and associated online testing had been increasing exponentially pre-pandemic. Growth likely will accelerate now that instructors and students have adapted to online course delivery and as universities look for ways to expand their student base.

Preventing occupational fraudsters

Where does it end? Consider the impact to you personally or professionally when your attorney, doctor or nurse, or IT security expert has cheated to earn their university degree or professional certification. Also consider the increased risk for your employer and the threat to the success of your work if co-workers’ college cheating made them ill-prepared for the workplace. CFEs can take action to minimize potential negative effects and prevent COVID cheaters from becoming occupational fraudsters.

[See sidebar: “Global Epidemic of Online Cheating”.]

Carolyn Conn, Ph.D., CFE, CPA, is a clinical assistant professor of accounting at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Contact her at cc31@txstate.edu.

Zachary M. Kelley is a lecturer at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Contact him at zachkelley@txstate.edu.

[sidebar]

Investigating Online Cheating

Investigating allegations of online cheating involves steps similar to occupational fraud examinations:

• Become familiar with the environment.
• Understand the procedures and any controls that were in place.
• Review university email among students suspected of cheating.
• Look for red flags that indicate something might be awry.
• Perform data analytics to identify patterns and anomalies.

[sidebar]

Global Epidemic of Online Cheating

Online cheating became a global epidemic of its own as an outcome of online testing because of COVID. As early as April 7, 2020, The New York Times published, “If My Classmates Are Going to Cheat on an Online Exam, Why Can't I?” (See the article by Kwame Anthony Appiah.)

Two months later, ABC News featured a story about medical students in South Korea who were caught cheating during online exams. More than 80% of the freshmen and sophomores shared answers and used other methods to cheat online. (See "Med school students in South Korea caught cheating on online exams during coronavirus pandemic,” by Heejin Kang, ABC News, June 3, 2020.)

In May 2020, West Point accused 73 cadets of cheating on an online freshman calculus exam. Instructors noticed irregularities in exam answers. Fifty-nine cadets admitted their guilt. Most were required to repeat a year, and eight were expelled. (See "51 West Point cadets caught cheating must repeat a year,” by Michael Hill, The Associated Press, in ArmyTimes, April 18, 2021.) West Point’s Cadet Honor Code specifies that cadets “will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The administrative response to the cheating became a scandal of its own when students who admitted guilt were allowed to participate in a rehabilitation program instead of West Point dismissing them. Some of those students were athletes who were allowed to play in the Liberty Bowl on Dec. 31, 2020.

CBC, Canada’s publicly owned news service, reported that academic misconduct had seen an uptick at Canadian universities. (See "Post-secondary students call for changes to online exam rules as cheating concerns rise,” by Jessica Wong, CBC, Oct. 25, 2020.) The academic misconduct included plagiarism, falsifying information, submitting work completed by someone else, and unauthorized collaboration and sharing of test questions or answers.

In Greece, the prevalence of cheating during online examinations has led some university faculty to use the phrase “Corona degrees” to refer to degrees awarded during the pandemic. A dean at the university of Crete reported a situation in which some students got help from an expert linguist who made an error and 50 students submitted papers with that same error. (See "Remote cheating leads to ‘corona degrees’ in Greece,” Study International, April 19, 2021.)

Scott McFarland, CEO of ProctorU, a commercial proctoring service, said that from January to March of 2020 (pre-pandemic), his firm identified fewer than 1% of 340,000 online exams with people cheating. That contrasted dramatically with an 8% rate of cheating on 1.3 million exams from April through June of 2020. (See "Another Problem with Shifting Education Online: Cheating,” by Derek Newton, The Hechinger Report, Aug. 7, 2020.) According to the article, schemes have ranged from the simple to the extreme. For example, a paid imposter took exams for 12 students at multiple U.S. universities.