Student Use of Homework Assistance Websites

The recent pandemic necessitated a migration to online instruction leading to concerns regarding the integrity of online assessments as a result of the presence of fee-based websites that disseminate answers to students. We validated this concern by evaluating student performance on an online quiz where some of the questions had easily searchable answers, and others that had been altered so that an internet search would return no usable results. Analysis of the results showed that students performed better on the readily searchable questions compared to those that were not. A follow-up study was conducted in which access to other websites was prohibited. In this assessment, students performed significantly worse on the previously searchable questions, but their performance on the de-identified questions was unchanged. Collectively, these results indicate that there was student use of homework assistance websites to obtain answers, a problem that should trouble accounting educators across the globe.