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In a French master course, I has been "forced" to offer the exam online, and without proctoring software.

The students hand-wrote their answers during a camera-on and microphone-on MS Teams call, showed quickly their text in front of the camera when they finished, and then they had some time to scan and upload it on the university Moodle-based web site. The exam was closed books.

Now, I have found that during the time they were still sitting the exam, two students went on the course site to download the PDFs, thanks to the Moodle logs. Another student uploaded an heavily "amended" version of his exam compared to the one he showed at the end of the exam...

The problem is that when I reported this to the master director, he minimised and said that it is ok, if I set a non passing grade they will go to next session... and that it was my fault to have set an online exam closed book..

What to do? Which are the "rules" for these cases in your university?

EDIT

Want to know how it ended up ? The exam has been called off for all the students (all automatically passed) because, while I did declare the exam to be recorder, I didn't specify the "reason" why it was recorded (!!). And I don't teach any more in that master.

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    How would rules at other universities help here? This is a local issue.
    – Buffy
    Commented Jan 5, 2023 at 22:29
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    Like most universities that don't have much of a reputation for the quality of its graduates, an ordinary French university has much more incentive to have more graduating students than incentives to make sure its graduates have learned anything. As a result, unless the incident threatens to become a known scandal, the incentives are to just look the other way. Furthermore, they are bureaucratic obstacles (almost everywhere) that make it harder to give a failing grade to students than to give a passing grade. Do you really want to fight this when it will make your life harder for no gain?
    – Alexander Woo
    Commented Jan 6, 2023 at 0:56
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    "and said that it is ok, if I set a non passing grade they will go to next session..." I don't understand this. Can't you just let the involved students fail your course?
    – Christian Hennig
    Commented Jan 6, 2023 at 13:36
  • @ChristianHennig Maybe I am completely misunderstanding that, but I think the director suggests that failing students in this case will just result in them retaking the exam, with no obligation to retake the classes, and at no risk of dropping out. So effectively OP can fail them in their course, but the administration effectively does not care and would put pressure on them for passing these students at one point in time or another.
    – Lodinn
    Commented Jan 7, 2023 at 1:39

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This depends on how your institution works, but most Universities have some sort of academic misconduct committee. This committee is independent of your regular chain of command, and basically anyone can directly report any misconduct (academic) to them and they will then do their investigations.

In your case, if such committee exist, I would imagine the chain of command would be for you to report to your master director, and then he/she will report in turn to the misconduct committee. Now, obviously the master director doesn't care, and in most institutions you can straight up skip the master director and report directly to the committee.

This would be your best course of action

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