The students interviewed by TODAY said that cheating was easier at the start of the pandemic when universities had to find ways to set up the remote exams at short notice, which sometimes meant a lack of precautions against cheating.
University students who sat for examinations online, during the early days of Singapore’s partial lockdown, said that there were few checks and barriers in place to deter cheating. She said: “In the first year , as the school was not prepared for the pandemic situation, we were given 24 hours to submit our papers and it was an open book assessment.”
Students who spoke to TODAY said that they cheated because they are graded on a bell curve and would be graded against those who cheated, placing them in a disadvantaged position.A student from another local university said that he worked together with others as he was “afraid of falling behind”, even though he is “adamantly opposed to cheating” and had “no desire to do so”.
A final year student from another local university said: “I believe that the purpose of examinations is to test what you really know and learn from the course, so if I have to cheat in order to pass the exam then it defeats the purpose of learning.”TODAY reached out to the six autonomous universities here and SIM GE for comments. Not all had responded by the time of publication.