One of the fears we typically encounter is that online exams will increase the academic dishonesty among students, citing the conclusion that using computers provides the students with more opportunities to cheat. But this is not necessarily the case.
According to a randomized response survey, an online setting for exams is not conducive to more cheating among students (Grijalva et al., 2006). Only an estimated 3-4 percent of the responders had cheated, which “suggests that academic dishonesty in a single online class is not greater than estimates of cheating in a traditional class” (Ibid., p. 13). A later study from another university finds that the amount of students cheating is much higher, but the equilibrium between cheating in a manual or online setting is maintained (Watson & Sottile, 2010). A third study suggest that an online setting is even less conducive to cheating than the traditional approach (Stuber-McEwen et al., 2009).