Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic stopped teaching at schools and universities overnight. Primary, secondary schools and universities in Slovakia have switched to on-line education, and many schools have developed systems to teach their students remotely, i.e. at a distance. The focus of this type of education has been on on-line platforms and tools, freely available digital textbooks, communication via e-mail, television broadcasting, the cloud, etc. For example, the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sports of the Slovak Republic presented recommendations to schools and teachers on how to teach students learning from home during a pandemic. The role of teachers has become to replace the full-fledged education of students with education with the active help of parents and to support university students in self-study. However, on-line education has also brought some negative effects on the quality of teaching and also on the increased requirements for the academic integrity of students.

In the study, the author deals with the negative effects of on-line education on the quality of education from the perspective of university students. It also focuses on the possible increased incidence of plagiarism in students' written work and on cheating students during exams. The author of the study conducted research to find out the attitudes and opinions of university students on the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to the quality of education and in relation to the higher incidence of academic dishonesty. In order to achieve the research objectives, we used the following research methods: analysis and synthesis of knowledge from relevant literature sources; questionnaire method - to find out the opinions and attitudes of university students on the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the quality of their education and mathematical-statistical methods of evaluating research results.

Analysis of the testimonies of research respondents, i.e. university students, confirmed our assumption that on-line teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has a negative impact on the quality of their education. The most significant negative impact students consider the absence of practical teaching, reduced motivation to study, inadequate quality of lectures from teachers and biased evaluation in relation to the acquired knowledge and skills. They also consider it a negative experience that they often used the opportunity to cheat during their exams and resorted to plagiarism more often when writing student works.

Keywords:

Distance education, on-line education, pandemic COVID-19, plagiarism, preventive measures.