Integrity vs. Quality of Assessments: Are They Compromised on the Online Platform?

Abstract

Integrity and quality of assessments on the online platform should be upheld to ensure that it supports student learning as well as the efficacy of teaching because in the end it measures the reputation of an institution. How institutions have traversed such domains remains a grey area. This paper provides anecdotal insights into how staff from a South African university have taken steps to mitigate against cheating to preserve integrity and quality of assessments. For this, a carefully designed survey with questions pertaining to integrity and quality of assessments were designed and administered to 11 physics staff members of the university. Results of the survey were presented and discussed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results reveal that staff are serious about the integrity of assessments and have employed various techniques to combat it, but full proof integrity of assessments cannot be fully arrested on the online platform with proctoring and other strategic measures in place.

Confronting Assessment Integrity of Higher Education Institutions during COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Almossa & Alzahrani (2022) recommends that all departments should develop evaluation procedures and update their course descriptions, exams should be administered in university labs to prevent cheating and faculty should be advised of specific training needs for instance, training on how to use technology in distance education. Some of the main actions taken by instructors to protect the integrity of assessments on the online platform include the use of the applications, presenting one question at a time on the screen, avoiding backtracking, randomizing the answers, and changing the questions from the textbook (Reddy et al, 2022). Giving each student a new set of questions is a great strategy for reducing academic dishonesty (Guangul et al, 2020).…”

The Bad and the Ugly: Reflections on the Use of Invigilator App by First-Year Students in English Proficiency for University Studies at an Odel University in South Africa

“…The urgent move to online assessment caused by the Covid-19 pandemic forced universities to move from venue-based to online assessment with little or no proper planning on how to invigilate these exams [5,12]. This led to concerns about things like cheating, hiring contract or ghost-writers, and other practices that could violate the integrity of the assessment.…”

“…Whilst there has been strong institutional uptake of high-stakes e-assessment, there has been little corresponding research conducted on students' attitudes towards and experiences of computer-based testing [20]. In the same breath, research on e-proctoring tools increased as universities grappled with ways of maintaining online assessment integrity [12].…”

Remote Assessment in Ukrainian Higher Education Institutions

“…Instructors at South African university implied Invigilator App as the proctoring software to invigilate assessments and used test settings on Blackboard that randomize answers and problems, forbid backtracking, limited duration, starting time frames, etc. They also offered penalties for late submission, rephrase and re-word questions taken from textbooks, refrain from using questions taken verbatim from publishers' websites, and offer different versions of the same task (Reddy et al, 2022).…”