Abstract:

The assessment of students' written and oral answers is an important element of the educational process at universities around the world. On the one hand, it makes it possible to define the quality of material assimilation by students, the level of their work independence and to determine the sustainability of the skills they acquire within the training period. On the other hand, it reveals the quality of the course organization’s academic delivery and the lecturer’s ability to motivate students to not only acquire knowledge but apply critical thinking on their own. Among the traditional techniques for monitoring students' knowledge the following are listed: observation of the students’ work during the lectures, oral and written answers in exams, testing, writing an essay on the proposed topic, portfolios and critical reflection on methodological and educational literature. All of these methods have been quite successful over time, as they have helped to minimize the risk of cheating in the context of student-teacher communication. However, the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent transition to distance learning have radically changed the situation, with traditional methods – in some instances - no longer as effective as they were. It is well known that various online sources offer ‘contract cheating’ or ‘homework help’ – asking someone for assistance in completing your coursework. Another issue is different types of interaction among students in exams, for example, hints, copying each other’s works, as well as some use of mobile devices or accessing the Internet during a test. In fact, a recent study from the Imperial College London appears to show a distinct increase in cheating instances since the Covid pandemic started. Today with pandemic still affecting academic institutions and conventional exams scrapped, university teachers are facing the necessity of finding new techniques to combat this increase in cheating, yet still assess their students. To achieve this, there has been an increase in the degree of independence of the assessment tasks performed: project work, individual problem-based tasks, and research-type tasks. An additional tool for reducing the level of fraud in attestation tests are a number of commercially available plagiarism software and hardware complex for checking submitted texts/documents for borrowing from open, online sources, video surveillance and learning management systems focused on organizing interaction between the lecturers and students in the framework of distance courses. For this paper, the authors have used a combination of research methodologies: personal professional experience observation, literature reviews, as well as quantitative and qualitative analysis of existing student assessment tools, and finally a questionnaire on students’ perceptions on the most efficient and preferable tools of knowledge assessment they have been exposed to. Preliminary results indicate that the set of knowledge control tools hasn’t changed greatly since the shift towards distance learning, but the there is a noticeable preference for certain assessment methods and a strong preference for their digital forms. Besides, the choice of knowledge control tools has effected the ability to critic and of original thinking among recent graduates, which decreases their employment perspectives.

Keywords:

assessment methods, exam cheating, education, distance learning, result validation, student evaluation, plagiarism, ethics, collusion