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The article documents students' experiences with the shift online at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides informed recommendations to STEM instructors regarding academic integrity and student stress. Over 500 students were surveyed on these topics, including an open-ended question. Students experienced more stress and perceived a greater workload in online courses and therefore preferred in-person courses overall. Personal awareness of cheating during online exams is positively correlated with the proportion of cheating a student perceives. Fear of getting caught is the best cheating deterrent while getting a better grade makes cheating most enticing. Randomization of questions and answer choices is perceived as a highly effective tool to reduce cheating and is reported as the least stress-inducing method. Inability to backtrack and time limits cause students the most stress. Students report that multiple choice questions are the least effective question type to discourage cheating and oral exam questions cause the most stress. Use of camera and lockdown browser or being video- and audio- recorded caused the majority of student stress. Yet, nearly 60% agree that the combination of camera and lockdown browser is an effective deterrent. Recommendations: (i) Be transparent regarding academic dishonesty detection methods and penalties. (ii) Use online invigilating tools. (iii) Synchronize exams and (iv) randomize exam questions. (v) Allow backtracking. (vi) Avoid converting in-person exams to online exams; instead, explore new ways of designing exams for the online environment.

The article documents faculty experiences with the shift online due to the pandemic and provides recommendations to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instructors. Over 100 faculty members were surveyed on these topics and contrasted with previously reported student experiences. The online shift changed how faculty administered exams, ran courses, and acted to ensure academic integrity. For example, when exams went online, 73% of faculty reported spending more time preventing cheating. Concerning academic integrity and stress, faculty and students agreed with the exception of a few notable disconnects. Students reported greater workloads in online classes, while faculty maintained that the shift online did not change student workloads. Students perceived more online cheating than faculty. Overall, there seems to be a significant disconnect regarding faculty not realizing how much their actions may encourage or discourage cheating. Few faculty (<15%) indicated that being a tough grader or having test times too short is a motivating factor, but over 55% of students reported that these motivate students to cheat. Conversely, over 60% of students reported respect for their professors discourages them from cheating, while only 37% of faculty indicated the same. Over 70% of faculty and students indicated that fear of getting caught is a deterrent to cheating. Recommendations to reconnect include (i) faculty should use the finding that the number one deterrent of cheating is fear of getting caught; and (ii) faculty should maintain students' respect by being clear or overestimating workload requirements, carefully adjusting time for online exams, and setting clear expectations with uncomplicated exam questions consistent with the material taught.

Using scanning tunneling microscopebreak-junction experimentsand a new first-principles approach to conductance calculations, wereport and explain low-bias charge transport behavior of four typesof metal–porphyrin–gold molecular junctions. A nonequilibriumGreen’s function approach based on self-energy corrected densityfunctional theory and optimally tuned range-separated hybrid functionalsis developed and used to understand experimental trends quantitatively.Importantly, due to the localized d states of the porphyrin molecules,hybrid functionals are essential for explaining measurements; standardsemilocal functionals yield qualitatively incorrect results. Comparingdirectly with experiments, we show that the conductance can changeby nearly a factor of 2 when different metal cations are used, counterto trends expected from gas-phase ionization energies which are relativelyunchanged with the metal center. Our work explains the sensitivityof the porphyrin conductance with the metal center via a detailedand quantitative portrait of the interface electronic structure andprovides a new framework for understanding transport quantitativelyin complex junctions involving molecules with localized d states ofrelevance to light harvesting and energy conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of cascade energy transfer between different dye molecules, single‐excitation and low threshold coherent random lasing with a high quality factor (∼13 000) over the whole visible range is experimentally observed using gold–silver bimetallic porous nanowires with abundant nanogaps as the scatterers. These nanogaps with different sizes in the bimetallic nanowires can produce continuous plasmonic resonance spectra and provide strong feedback or gain channels for the stimulated emission from different dye molecules. It guarantees a low threshold of lasing. Moreover, multi gain media can provide broad tunability of the emission wavelength when the system is pumped by single‐wavelength pulses. It provides excellent flexibility for the design of multicolor output devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]