How do students cheat in online-class assignment? Why did they do it? How to grade their work?
According to the COVID outbreak, at-school class cannot be performed. This course in the current semester excluded examination, but using additional activities instead. Therefore, most students got higher grade than students in previous semester. If the students took the exam, it means they need to remember everything they learned in the semester and take a test at the end. However, for the current semester, they were assigned with activities in-and-after classes, it means they can use their knowledge gained from the class immediately. This could be the reason that they can perform in class activities better than in exam.
Copyrights by Proud Arunrangsiwed, 2022
That was for most students. Most of my students got higher grade comparing to the traditional class with examination, but not for cheating students. I did not grade the dishonest students in the particular assignment(s). They were not allowed to submit the new clean one. They could only get graded from the next one. And if they kept doing this dishonesty over 3 times, their overall grade would be reduced.
It is very easy for students to cheat when they are not at school in front of their teacher. Normally, I gave away 2 types of assignments. One is the in-class activities. Students had limited time and had to submit it in class period. I would give them about 20 minutes until up to an hour. It was very strange to me. This type of assignment consisted of less cheating even all students were in a hurry. Lack of time may cause uncertainty and feeling like being watched.
Another type of activities is that students had a week to finish the assignment. I asked them to write a tutorial of how to process their selected software. Most students selected different software, but if some of them selected the same software, they had to write tutorial of different functions. However, some of them copy tutorials written by someone else online. I did not grade the copied work, and if they asked me about their grade, I would explain them about this reason.
At the end of semester, everyone had to do the screen record and explain how to use their selected software. A few of them still say everything based one the text they copied from someone else. I gave the low grades for these students.
An older professor told me that students may afraid that their work is not good enough, so they copy things from the internet. Earlier, I thought that students with low-prior knowledge might also be low in confidence, so they were dishonest. However, in this semester, in the mentioned assignment, students had a week to write the tutorial by themselves, and had another week to do the screen record. If they made mistake in their first video, they had plenty of time to re-record over and over again. I am happy that many students are honest in this assignment, but I am still confused about the reason behind the dishonest ones. It must not be about their confidence, but it might be their personality trait to perform dishonesty in class work. If anyone know this, please leave some comments below. I want to know and try to fix this in the next course.