DTU conducted this year’s final exams online without supervision, trusting the students to live up to the code of honour they signed at the beginning of their study programme. And the vast majority of them did.
All DTU students sign DTU’s Code of Honor, thus agreeing to meet the high standards of scientific conduct that applies in academia. At the same time, they promise that their exams will always only reflect their own work and that they will not communicate with others during the exams.
Since the code of honour was introduced three years ago, the responsibility for not cheating has, in principle, been the students’ and not the University’s. However, this distribution of responsibility was never more relevant than now during the corona crisis, when the University was forced to conduct all exams online, and DTU’s approximately 12,000 students had to complete the tasks from home.
“We could have chosen to use various digital surveillance methods, such as having the students switch on Zoom so that the course coordinators could see if they were actually alone. But that’s not the way we want to run our University. We would rather act as a business than as a kindergarten, showing the students trust and giving them freedom with responsibility and without extensive control,” says Dean of Graduate Studies and International Affairs Philip Binning.
And the students agree. Their association, PF, helped plan this year’s unusual exams.
“If DTU had demanded digital surveillance, I think the students would generally have been very displeased. You end up affecting both the honest and the dishonest students, and young people generally feel very bad about digital surveillance,” says PF President Søren Sandgaard.
Responsible young people
Each year, DTU conducts approximately 36,000 written exams for about 12,000 students. In 2019, there were 183 reports of cheating, and 117 students felt the harsh consequences by having their exams cancelled—9 of them were also expelled from DTU for a semester or longer. So far this year, the number of reports has risen to 260, and 20 students have been temporarily expelled.
“However, it is still only a very small proportion of students who did not comply with the code of honour. Of course, there will always be a number of cases we have not detected. But most students lived up to the trust we showed them. So there is plenty of reason to celebrate that both our code of honour and the young people passed the test,” says Philip Binning.