Academic Honesty during the 2020 COVID-19 Shutdown: Perspectives from Instructors and Students in Higher Education

The higher education Spring semester of 2020 was heavily impacted by stakeholders' calls for a complete shutdown of in-person gatherings. This call to action forced instructors and students to transition from face-to-face education to the virtual, online classroom. Institutions were given a few days to 2 weeks for this transition. During this crisis, 14 faculty from across Georgia formed a research consortium to investigate the perspectives of instructors and students on multiple topics, including academic honesty. As part of a mixed method approach, surveys were distributed via email across the university system, which included both quantitative items and narrative, open-text response options. The results of thematic analysis and frequencies revealed the application of well-documented strategies from instructors for reducing the occurrence of cheating during assessments but also revealed new and challenging tactics of cheating by students. These perspectives from the instructors and students provide a rich description of how the shutdown impacted academic honesty in the higher education community. The authors detail these participant narratives and provide information on strategies to encourage academic honesty that move beyond creating more tests, such as revision, randomizing items, and proctoring to catch cheaters in the act.