Academic dishonesty in distance education courses: a quasi-experimental study

Abstract

This research study focuses on the growing concern of academic misconduct in distance education courses. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to measure the impact of introducing webcam recording software as an online supervision tool for high-stakes exams in two separate online courses (Management and Accounting). Results revealed that overall performance decreased following implementation of the software, and persisted after taking potential confounding factors into account. Additionally, the explanatory power of the regression analysis was higher for scores under supervision, which suggests that cheating was occurring before online supervision was introduced. It can be concluded from this study that online supervision is an effective tool to combat academic dishonesty in distance education courses.