Academic Integrity in Online Foreign Language Assessment: What Does Current Research Tell Us?

Introduction

The recent and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has required most of the institutions or schools around the world to prioritize online education. During this period, foreign language teachers have begun to deliver their courses through online platforms and thereby, assess their learners online by means of digital tools. But this kind of teaching and assessment has been performed under a sudden and unplanned mode of education (Zhang et al., 2021). That is, most institutions have been unprepared for this rapid shift of education from face-to-face to face-to-screen mode, so it is called emergency remote teaching (ERT) (Henari & Ahmed, 2021). ERT is not the same with the concept of already established and well-planned online education systems and principles but rather, it is an immediate action to this crisis situation (Gacs et al., 2020). Therefore, teachers and other stakeholders have made their best efforts to handle this situation efficiently by adapting their policies, strategies, methods, and practices of teaching/learning and assessment.

However, most of teachers have had some difficulties especially in testing, assessing, and evaluating the learners’ language performance online in an effective way (Beck et al., 2020). Although online assessment has already been used with the integration of digital technologies into the instruction (Oldfield et al., 2012), conducting online language assessment is a new way for most of them during ERT. That is, many have been introduced to this type of assessment for the first time, and thus, they need to cope with its requirements on their own most of the time (Beck et al., 2020). In this sense, a number of teachers have adjusted or modified their language assessment methods and strategies according to what online instruction demands. Nevertheless, some have been successful in handling such assessment (Situmorang et al., 2020) whereas some others have had problems such as not having required knowledge, being inexperienced, and not having digital technological competence (Anasse & Rhandy, 2021), not having adequate support or guideline (Czura & Dooly, 2021), internet connection problems (Hakim, 2020), cheating and plagiarism issues (Blinova, 2022), and not being able to design reliable and valid items (Behforouz, 2022). As it is widely acknowledged that language assessment is an integral part of teaching because it gives feedback about the instruction to guide and plan appropriate learning activities so as to develop learners’ knowledge and performance in language learning as well as to motivate them for better learning opportunities (Rogier, 2014). So, most teachers have tried to overcome the problems in online assessment with or without help to perform better practices to improve learners’ progress as much as possible even under such conditions. For example, most studies have indicated that formative assessment practices have been preferred and used during the pandemic over the summative ones due to several reasons, and challenges but the most highlighted concern has become academic dishonesty in online assessment (Bjelobaba, 2021; Koris & Pal, 2021). Indeed, one of the most debatable and challenging recent concerns is about how to provide academic integrity in online assessment; no matter what the nature (i.e., summative or formative) or the timing of assessment is (i.e., synchronous or asynchronous application) (Bjelobaba, 2021). It is because foreign language teachers have had serious concerns and problems about this issue, specifically while administering their assessment methods during the pandemic (Gamage et al., 2020).