Cheating in online exams without face-to-face proctoring has been a general concern for academic instructors during the crisis caused by COVID-19. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the cost of these dishonest practices by comparing the academic performance of webcam-proctored students and their unproctored peers in an online gradable test. With this aim in mind, we carried out a randomized field experiment using a simple video surveillance system through Google Meet during an online closed-book final exam of an Introduction to Microeconomics course. Given that all conditions except for webcam monitoring were identical, differences in between-subjects scores are attributed to academic dishonesty. After controlling for potential confounding factors, including gender, academic degree, instructor, previous score and whether students were repeaters or not, we found that those students who were proctored via webcam obtained statistically significant lower scores in the final exam than those who were not using this surveillance system with a low level of invasiveness. Inspection of the potential factors behind these differences in scores suggests that the poorer performance of proctored students is more related to academic dishonesty than to reasons involving anxiety or heterogeneity factors.

在 COVID-19 引发的危机期间，在没有面对面监考的情况下在线考试中作弊一直是学术教师普遍担心的问题。这项工作的主要目标是通过在在线分级测试中比较网络摄像头监考的学生和未监考的同龄人的学业成绩，来评估这些不诚实行为的成本。考虑到这一目标，我们在微观经济学概论课程的在线闭卷期末考试期间，通过 Google Meet 使用简单的视频监控系统进行了随机现场实验。鉴于除了网络摄像头监控之外的所有条件都是相同的，科目间分数的差异被归因于学术不诚实。在控制了潜在的混杂因素，包括性别、学历、导师后，根据之前的分数以及学生是否留级，我们发现那些通过网络摄像头监考的学生在期末考试中获得的分数显着低于那些没有使用这种侵入性较低的监控系统的学生。对这些分数差异背后的潜在因素的检查表明，受监考学生的较差表现更多地与学术不诚实有关，而不是与焦虑或异质性因素有关。