Stop tempting your students to cheat

Maintaining academic integrity is paramount for educators, and even more so for health science educators, where the health of patients is potentially at stake. However, as more content and assessments are pushed into an online forum, more hurdles are being placed in the path of keeping everyone honest without requiring significant financial resources for online proctoring of every assessment. This commentary explores the suggestion of re-evaluating the need for graded course assessments as a way to uphold academic integrity.

One reason pharmacy students participate in academic dishonesty is the nature of the assessments employed, with students more likely to cheat on higher stakes assessments (i.e. graded assessments). There is an established difference between learning and performance, where a learning environment encourages mistakes and graded assessments lead more to performance. While the use of retrieval practice can facilitate learning, this can be done with ungraded formative assessments without decline in summative assessment scores.

Transitioning formative assessments from graded to ungraded while keeping them closed-book and at an appropriate level of difficulty allows for learners to make mistakes, utilize retrieval practice, and ultimately, learn. This transition also allows the pharmacy program to spend their financial resources on proctoring summative assessments only. Making this change strikes a balance between learning and performance while still making strides to maintain academic integrity.