Vassilis KYRIAKOULIS
Shuttered for over a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Greek universities are now grappling with a surge in online exam cheating giving rise to a new reality: the “corona degree”.
Both professors and students candidly admit that examination safeguards are practically impossible to enforce in a remote-learning environment with hundreds of participants simultaneously online.
“In jest, we call the degrees to be awarded this season ‘corona degrees’’’, says John Mylopoulos, a professor of environmental engineering and former rector of Thessaloniki’s Aristotelio University.
“Remote learning is supposed to be a supplementary education tool. When it completely subsumes teaching, problems begin’’, he said.
Sofia, a 20-year-old psychology student at Aristotelio, says that “last summer, I took two exams on behalf of two of my friends and nobody realised.”
“I logged in using their computers and personal registration codes. There was no requirement for an open camera during the exam. My two friends received a nearly perfect score without opening a book,” she said.
Many professors have been surprised to see even long-term students who haven’t set foot in a university campus for years scoring high results.
“Result averages are up, and people we haven’t seen in years are showing up for exams because the system makes it easy to cheat’’, says Kostas Kosmatos, an assistant professor of criminology at Thrace’s Democritus University.
Kosmatos notes that only an open-camera examination can help restore transparency to the procedure.
Angela Kastrinaki, dean of the University of Crete’s literature department, says it is easy for students to Google exam answers even under the eye of supervisors on camera.
“We get paraphrased Wikipedia answers,” she notes. Some of her students even enlisted a respected specialist in linguistic history to help crack an exam question that was not available online.
“But even he got a verse wrong, so I got 50 papers with the same mistake. It was funny,” says Kastrinaki. Overall, she found 100 students had employed some form of cheating that day.
Natassa, a 20-year-old student at the University of Ioannina, recalls that one of her friends gave 100 euros ($120) to a teacher to sit her mathematics exam for her.
“In the end, she did not get a particularly good grade,” she laughs. — AFP
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