Cheating epidemic grips UWI

David Salmon/Gleaner Writer

A thriving culture of cheating has been documented across the campuses of The University of the West Indies, forcing the administration to pull the plug on remote testing and order all students return to physical sites for examinations at the end of the current semester.

The examination irregularities which have surfaced in the remote learning and testing environment ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic were detailed in a communique sent to staff last week, a copy of which The Gleaner has seen.

The document – titled 'Situational Analysis for Staging of Face-to-Face Final Examinations for Semester One 2021-2022 – revealed that in the first semester of the 2018-2019 academic year, five irregularities were reported with another four in the second semester.

Fourteen cases were recorded in the first semester of the 2019-2020 year and as exams went online in the second semester due to the pandemic, the number skyrocketed to 81.

Last academic year, which saw online exams taking place in both semesters, 98 cases were detected both in the December and May exams.

The number of reports for summer school irregularities also rose from one in 2018-19 to six in 2019-20 and eight in 2020-2021.

The document highlighted that despite efforts by the university to tackle the problem, the numbers have not fallen.

“Despite faculty continuously adjusting their approach to the assessment and the campus introducing campaigns to promote and encourage academic honesty, the campus continues to experience unacceptably high amount of irregularities each semester,” the document said.

An even more worrying observation, it noted, is the blossoming of a new industry that has enabled this cheating epidemic.

“It has also been bought to our attention that cheating in tertiary exams is becoming an organised and lucrative industry with students paying third parties to complete assessments on their behalf,” the document said.

This is likely to pose challenges for the institution as it recently improved its international ranking, moving into the 1.5 per cent of tertiary institutions, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.

While declining to comment on the revelations, Campus Registrar Dr Donovan Stanberry explained that the challenges with online examinations have been noted across tertiary institutions globally.

“Every single institution that has engaged online examinations, particularly those that do not have the capacity to proctor exams are at risk. Human nature is such that if you do not have somebody supervising you, people will yield to their baser instincts and cheat,” he told The Gleaner on Wednesday night.

To enable the resumption of face-to-face examinations, the university indicated in a memo sent to students on Wednesday that the administration has established 19 examination centres across the region to facilitate this process.

The memo added that students who are unable to sit the exams this year will be given an 'In Progress' grade for the course and be allowed to sit the examination in April/May 2022 during semester two final exams.

The decision to resume face-to-face exams have been met with concern by recently elected Medical Association of Jamaica president, Dr Brian James, who believes that at present no physical examinations should take place without students having a high vaccination rate.

“In relation to regular classes for high schools, it was decided that face to face classes would not happen until 65 percent of the population of the school was vaccinated. I believe that a similar kind of restriction would be appropriate for all kinds of gathering including doing exams,” James said.

Stanberry revealed that at present, the university was not able to determine the percentage of the student population that has been vaccinated. And although he said that the vaccination rates for lecturers was higher than the national average, he was also not able to give a precise estimate of the numbers.

Stanberry said that all examinations would adhere to the regulations set out in the Disaster Risk Management Act. He clarified that to date, the university has not approached the Ministry of Health and Wellness about the hosting of examinations as the institution is still examining the number of students that will be present at each of the examination centres.

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