Academic Integrity in Online Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Social Media Mining Study
Mohammad Parsa, Lukasz Golab
Jun 30, 2021 20:40 UTC+2
—
Session PS1
—
Gather Town
Keywords: Academic integrity, Social media mining, Topic modelling
Abstract:
Academic integrity has been a frequently reported challenge in online education. Given the widespread transition to online program delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, we ask the following question: \emph{How do college students feel about online cheating?}. Our analysis is based on academic discussions on the Reddit social curation platform in Fall 2020 and, for comparison, Fall 2019. We found more discussions related to cheating in 2020 than in 2019, and the topics have expanded from plagiarism in programming assignments to online assessments in general. Topic modelling of the Fall 2020 discussions revealed three concerns raised by students: that cheating inflates grades and forces instructors to increase the difficulty of assessments; that witnessing cheating go unpunished is demotivating; and that academic integrity policies are not always communicated clearly.