WHY DO WE CHEAT ONLINE? (ANALYSIS OF STUDENT’S OPINIONS OF DISTANCIAL LEARNING DURING THE PANDEMIC OF COVID 19)

Abstract. The Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in the transfer of most educational institutions to a distance format, has significantly changed traditional teaching methods, including the methods of student assessment.

With all the advantages of testing students’ knowledge online, the problem of mass cheating has become generally recognized, which cannot but lead to devaluation of the grade, and in the future, the diploma received.

The aim of the research was to study the behavior of students studying foreign languages during control activities in the conditions of distance learning, to identify the reasons that prompt them to resort to deceiving the teacher and to find the ways to solve this problem.

The hypothesis of the study assumed that the study of cases of students’ academic dishonesty would allow a better understanding of its causes and, accordingly, revise the approaches to assessing students’ work during distance learning, and would also allow to adapt current teaching methods to the modern work format using distance learning technologies.

As a research method an online survey1was chosen which gave the possibility to collect the responses of more than three hundred

1https://www.survio.com/survey/d/M9B8R6L8I9P2I5J2D

students. The obtained data undergone statistical and analytical processing and were presented in the form of graphs.
As a result of empirical data comparative analysis, the reasons that make students cheat more during distance learning were identified. It was noted that during distance learning, students feel less control from the teacher, as well as have less confidence in their knowledge accompanied with a desire to get a good grade at all costs. The study analyzes students’ opinions on what can be done to improve the situation. Main teachers’ mistakes, which most often lead to dishonest work of students, were identified. The options for solving this problem were revealed, they include methodological, pedagogical, and technical methods. According to the respondents, technical techniques, such as turning on the camera, checking students for headphones, or a proctoring system, were named as solutions to the problem, but turned out to be less preferred than methodological and pedagogical methods. The data obtained allow to determine the main areas to work on reducing academic fraud in distance learning. Keywords: cheating online; students’ assessment, Covid-19