Academic Dishonesty in Online Assessment from Tertiary Students’ Perspective

Typical face-to-face assessments were suspended by many tertiary institutions since the first quarter of 2020 due to the pandemic of COVID-19. Many have resorted to online assessment to evaluate students’ performance. However, academic dishonesty particularly plagiarism becomes an issue as the technology utilized to complete the online assessment provides students with the opportunities to commit academic cheating. Hence, the objectives of the study are to explore the potential methods employed by tertiary students to cheat in online assessment and identify the preventive measures taken by lecturers and tertiary institution to curb the problem. A survey was conducted in a tertiary institution with 403 responses were obtained to achieve the objective of the study. The results show that five of the potential methods were not employed to cheat in online assessment as perceived by the tertiary students, while they moderately agreed on the other three. This is probably due to the three preventive measures implemented by the tertiary institution to curb the problem. However, these measures should be well-implemented to ensure its effectiveness in preventing academic cheating in online assessment.