Are Online Exams an Invitation to Cheat?

This study uses data from two online courses in principles of economics to estimate a model that predicts exam scores from independent variables of student characteristics. In one course the final exam was proctored, in the other course the final exam was not proctored, and in both courses the first three exams were unproctored. If no cheating took place we expect the prediction model to have the same explanatory power for all exams, and conversely, if cheating occurred in the unproctored exam the explanatory power would be lower. Our findings are that both across and within class variations in the R-squared statistic suggest that cheating was taking place when the exams were not proctored.