Abstract:

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has provided new opportunities for assessing students’ learning electronically. Consequently, e-assessment practices are increasing rapidly. E-assessment can be defined as an electronic assessment process in which information and communication technologies are used for the presentation of assessment activity, and the recording of responses. On one hand, some authors argue that e-assessment has many advantages such as flexibility, convenience, time saving, immediate feedback, automated marking, better use of resources and assessment records saving. On the other hand, there are arguments that using technology in assessment can facilitate cheating and plagiarism. Therefore, cheating and plagiarism can be considered to be a major concern in e-assessment in higher education. To solve this problem, student authentication and authorship systems have been developed in recent years. The TeSLA system (An Adaptive Trust-Based E-Assessment System for Learning), which is currently being developed under a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Commission, is one of the authentication and authorship systems and constitutes the rationale of this paper. In this context, the aim of this study is to determine higher education students’ views on how to prevent cheating and plagiarism in e-assessment, which is intended to inform the design, development and implementation of the TeSLA system.

Research questions are as follows:
- What are the students’ opinions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of e-assessment?
- What types of cheating do the students witness most frequently in non-invigilated exams carried out in an online environment?
- How do students think cheating and plagiarism could be prevented or diminished in their university courses?

The study was designed as a cross sectional survey. Participants were 952 students from two public universities in Turkey and Bulgaria, which were among the universities testing the TeSLA system. The data was collected via a questionnaire consisting of 8 closed and 1 open-ended questions, which was administered online via Google forms and Survey Monkey. The data was analyzed descriptively. The findings of the study will be discussed in the light of relevant literature.

Keywords:

E-Assessment, Cheating, Plagiarism, Higher Education.