Campus lockdowns triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic led exam halls across the country to go virtual last spring. At the University of British Columbia, math instructor Elyse Yeager and her colleagues were counting on about 1,000 first-year students to respect the honour system during their online finals.
What happened next is a snapshot of a problem educators are seeing exacerbated by the pandemic; one with privacy, legal and ethical implications that are shaping the way students cheat, and get caught.
“Within the first half-hour of the exam, basically every question was answered on Chegg,” said Yeager.
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Chegg – a U.S. company which began as a textbook marketplace and now offers “24/7 homework help” – is one of the services emerging, with ostensibly greater prevalence than before, on the battlefront of academic integrity.
And professors are losing ground thanks to the virtual learning transition spurred by the pandemic.
