Aurelija Daukšaitė-Kolpakovienė

ABSTRACT

Academic dishonesty has always been an important issue at university level (Baran & Jonason 2020; Benson et al. 2019; Morris 2018). However, due to the spread of COVID-19, a switch of university classes to distance learning environments has brought even more challenges. In 2020, VMU teachers were given recommendations that could help to ensure academic integrity during the assessment of students, but it does not mean it actually was ensured. As a result, in the beginning of 2021, the Order for Distance Language Learning was approved by the IFL Council at VMU, introducing more rules and restrictions. Nevertheless, it would interesting to learn whether the students of English had followed any rules of academic integrity the year before this order, when the teachers tried to ensure academic integrity as best as they could. Thus, an online questionnaire was administered to 44 students before the start of the spring semester of 2021 and asked to reflect on their academic integrity while studying English in the distance learning environment in 2020. Almost 90% of the respondents were freshmen, so their responses were only about the fall semester of 2020 (they studied English at intermediate level then). The respondents were provided with a list of 13 statements and asked to choose all the possible ones in order to reflect on their academic integrity and explain their choices in a provided text box. The findings showed that almost 30% of the respondents had used their notes during tests, midterm tests and examinations, approximately 17% used various Internet resources, and around 14% of them used class materials.

Keywords

academic integrity; distance learning; EFL, university students

References

1. Baran, L. & Jonason, P. K. (2020). Academic dishonesty among university students: The roles of the psychopathy, motivation, and self-efficacy. PLoS ONE, 15(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238141

2. Benson, L., Rodier, K., Enström, R. & Bocatto, E. (2019). Developing a university-wide academic integrity E-learning tutorial: a Canadian case. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 15(5), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-019-0045-1

3. Morris, E. J. (2018). Academic integrity matters: five considerations for addressing contract cheating. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 14(15), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-018-0038-5