Exam cheating and academic integrity breaches during the covid-19 pandemic: an analysis of internet search activity in spain
Open accessAbstract
Academic institutions worldwide have had to adapt their methods of teaching and assessment due to COVID-19. In many Spanish universities exams moved online, affording students with opportunities to breach academic integrity that were not previously available to them. This paper uses the emerging research method of search engine data analysis to investigate the extent of requests for exam cheating information in Spain in the time period surrounding adjustments for the pandemic. The Internet data analytics technique is one that the paper proposes should be used more widely as an academic integrity research method. For this study, search engine activity data on exam cheating in Spain was collected and analysed for the five-year period between 2016 and 2020 inclusive. The data suggests that students are searching for information about ways to cheat in exams, including how to create cheat sheets. Most strikingly, the results show a significant increase in requests for information on cheating on online exams during the COVID-19 timeframe and the Spanish lockdown period. Based on the findings, academic institutions in other regions should be wary about the opportunities that their students have to commit exam fraud.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 61 · Cited by 100
Research works printed but not linked: 2
- Comas R. El ciberplagio y otras formas de deshonestidad académica entre el alumnado universitario (Doctoral Dissertation) 2009 Palma de Mallorca: Universidad de las Islas Baleares (Spain) https://dspace.uib.es/xmlui/handle/11201/153195
- Daly T. Bait and switch: the search engine optimization content practises of contract cheating websites Proc. Plag. Across Eur. Beyond 2020 2020 57 62 https://academicintegrity.eu/conference/proceedings/2020/daly20.pdf
- Authors
- Comas-Forgas, R., Lancaster, T., Calvo-Sastre, A., & Sureda-Negre, J.
- Affiliations
- Imperial College London (GB)
- ORCID
- Lancaster, Thomas
- Venue
- Heliyon
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2021-10
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- e08233
- ISSN
- 2405-8440 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8539823
- OpenAlex
- W3211254352
- Cited by
- 100
- References
- 61
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 20 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 23
- FWCI
- 23.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Heliyon (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- European Regional Development Fund
- Gobierno de España Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
- Gobierno de Espana Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (RTI2018-098314-B-I00)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Academic integrity and plagiarism
- Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection
- Social Sciences › Education › Education during COVID-19 pandemic
- Keywords
- exam cheating, academic integrity, online examinations, COVID-19 pandemic, online search behavior, academic fraud, Spanish universities, lockdown, cheat sheets
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
