Oral exams may stop culture of cheating – Study

Times Higher Education 05 September 2014

Replacing written exams or coursework with oral assessment may help to stop potentially high levels of cheating by students in universities in Gulf states, writes Jack Grove for Times Higher Education.

While the exact number of cases of academic dishonesty in Arab countries is not known, cheating is likely to be fairly widespread thanks to deeply ingrained cultural reasons, according to a paper published in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International.

Those reasons include the reluctance to call out suspected cheats owing to Arab society’s ‘collectivist ethos’, in which individuals from the same social group protect each other, and the greater tendency of students to work together on assignments, according to the paper’s authors, three Western academics working at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, part of the United Arab Emirates.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site

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