Cheating at online formative tests: Does it pay off?

Online testing has become a common way to organize formative assessment in higher education. When student participation is stimulated by grading formative tests that are held in an unproctored online environment, this raises the issue of academic dishonesty. In the literature, a debate is waged on the prevalence of cheating in unproctored online environments. The issue is whether online exams are invitations to cheat. We add to this literature by using the Harmon & Lambrinos (2008) and Jacob & Levitt (2003) approaches to detect cheating. Next, we go one step further by exploring whether cheating in online formative tests will do the suspected perpetrators any good. This is a non-trivial question, as students that cheat at formative tests forsake the opportunity to enhance their learning and may suffer the consequences in subsequent proctored summative tests. We investigate this using data from a large School of Economics in the Netherlands. We calculate a score that indicates the likelihood of cheating, based on unexpected grade patterns, and find that this score is negatively related to academic progress. Our evidence thus suggests that while cheating in online formative tests may happen, it does not seem to pay off.