(137e) Online Cheating: A Darker Side of Educational Technology

While technology has had many positive impacts on education, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also offered new opportunities for academic integrity violations. In particular, “tutoring” websites such as Chegg and Course Hero can be used by students to post homework or even exam problems for another person to solve; these problems and solutions are then posted online, possibly violating copyright laws as well as codes of student conduct at the students’ academic institutions.

This study examines the prevalence of custom instructor-created exam problems posted to tutoring websites without instructor knowledge. Findings will include the frequency of exam problems appearing online and whether the nature of the course (traditional, online, etc.) has any effect on frequency. Best practices toward (a) identifying whether students have posted materials online and (b) minimizing opportunities for students to post course materials online will be presented.