LECTURERS’ VIEWS ON THE EFFECTS OF COVID-19 ON THE INTEGRITY OF LEARNING ASSESSMENTS AT TWO MULTI-CAMPUS SOUTH AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

In December 2019, the COVID-19 virus was first detected in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China. By February/March 2020, it was declared a world pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). To keep the virus from spreading, various tertiary institutions around the world were closed by their respective governments and forced to move to an online model for teaching and learning, as well as for assessments. The closure affected the studies of around 200 million tertiary students. The move to online learning did not only have an impact on the teaching element, but also affected the integrity of the assessments. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent the integrity of the assessments was affected when institutions moved to online learning, especially the ethicality with which students answered the assessments. Purposive sampling was applied in selecting the participants and a self-developed questionnaire was used as the selected research tool. Findings indicate that to ensure the integrity of assessments remained intact, lecturers experienced challenges in managing their time, as they had to set more questions in a pool used for formative assessments than they had to pre-COVID, to limit the possibility of students cheating. Difficulties were also experienced in the use of proctoring systems, as lecturers were not familiar with these systems, which brought additional stress. It can thus be ascertained from the research that failure to ensure the integrity of assessments can lead to possible failure in ethical answering of assessments.