We have had all heard it said that education is the key to success. This adage is born out of how going to school can give every student an equal opportunity to carve out a niche for themselves in the professional world and pursue a fruitful career.
For this to work out, educational qualifications must be acquired justly for each student to gain an equal advantage.
Nevertheless, education malpractices hinder this attempt at fairness in achieving a professional qualification. The precise definition of these misconducts amounts to academic dishonesty or fraud done during an examination.
Also, students are not the only ones capable of exam transgressions as instructors may fall in this category too. In any case, this article will delve into how students commit education malpractices. Additionally, it will look into how we can use technology to curb such instances effectively.
How Students Attempt to Fool the System
Examinations offer open channels for instructors to gauge the ability of the student.
They can also be used to determine the merit of scholars in terms of gaining academic qualifications. Hence, these understudies can enter the job market after being certified to have the necessary skills. Dishonest students have various ways of trying to beat the fair system.
- Plagiarism amounts to using the work of authors without giving them the necessary credit for the literature in terms of referencing their publication.
- Fabrication involves cooking values for data or information that you have not found. Also, this could include citing literature falsely.
- Cheating is carrying relevant material into an examination room that can help you take the test. There are cases where you may be expected to bring in tools that you can use during the exam. Cheating merely refers to taking material that your instructors do not expect or have no idea about.
- Instructor misconduct entails a teacher giving a student grades that they do not deserve.
- Bribery can be used to buy the correct answers to an examination. Plus, it could be that you are trying to purchase the questions to a custom writing test so that you can study them before the exam.
Technological Tools to Help Spot and Stop Cheating in Exams
The traditional methods for conducting and overseeing examinations has numerous flaws. For starters, generating the results may be delayed due to grading and recording issues. Secondly, there are ways that the students can copy or sneak cheat sheets to help them.
Finally, the exam material—both question and answer sheets—may be mishandled or misplaced. This opens up a window for some students to buy the test material or others to miss marks due to missing papers. Still, technology offers us various tools that can help curb education malpractices in online-administered examinations.
Preventing Students from Copying and Sharing Exam Material
Adequate preparation can ensure that you are ready for any question that the examiner can throw at you. Yet, there is still a chance that you will get stuck on one or two challenging ones. In an online exam, you might be tempted to copy the question in a separate tab that will allow you to search for the answer.
Through technology, examiners can make it so that the copy function is disabled on questions or use various content similarities detection tools. Thus, a student cannot use any copy and pasting options on their keyboard, or any other method to search for the correct answers. Securing the question paper is a terrific way to curb malpractices during a test.
A brilliant student may find inventive ways of beating the system. Collaboration, although encouraged during class, is detrimental during an exam. Scholars can share whatever is on their screen—questions or answers—with another person on a different device.
Hence, they can get illegal assistance in answering a complicated test query. Through technology, examiners can bar such applications that allow users to share content.
Monitoring Students During Examinations
Crafty students may go the extra mile to sneak assisting material into an examination room. However, through placing CCTV cameras, invigilators can monitor what a student is doing while taking the test. Consequently, they can spot any scholar that is engaging in examination misconduct.
If malpractice is not seen occurring in real-time, a review of the test footage can be used to find these cheeky students. In addition, this technology can be used to identify and certify the identity of the understudies taking the paper.
Cheating students rely on the loopholes found in technology to give themselves an illegal upper hand in tests.
Nevertheless, examiners can harness new tools to spot and prevent such occurrences. We should strive to ensure that academic qualifications are garnered fairly.