How To Prevent Cheating In Online Exams
Preserving academic integrity in online education is an ongoing struggle. While technology solutions, such as retinal eye scanners, can assist in combatting cheating, such methods are costly and not practical in all online classrooms.
Faculty can implement several effective measures to stop cheating during online exams. These strategies may include:
Randomization
As online education continues to proliferate, cheating in exams has become an increasing problem. Students can cheat using various means from writing notes on paper or their hands to using apps and software on smartphones to coordinate during an exam session.
Cheating in an online test can be extremely challenging to detect and manage; however, there are some simple techniques and tricks which can help detect and prevent cheating during an exam.
Randomization can be an extremely useful technique to make online tests harder for students to cheat in. This approach can be applied in various forms – including randomly rearranging questions, hiding answers and restricting access to the question bank during exams.
One way to prevent cheating in online exams is using voice detection software during the exam. This technology listens for specific words or phrases such as “OK Siri” or “OK Google,” and alerts a remote proctor so he or she can intervene and stop cheating from occurring.
Limit the number of questions displayed during an online test to prevent students from comparing answers or searching the web or textbooks for answers they already know the answers to. Furthermore, dynamic questions make answering them harder as their answers adapt based on each student’s responses – making the task of finding correct answers even harder!
Prior to the exam, it is also crucial that students are reminded of academic integrity policies and consequences. Offering them a clear explanation of these rules increases their likelihood of acting honestly during an online test. It may also help if you give students access to videos of an instructor discussing these guidelines before an exam as this could have an immediate psychological effect and deter students from engaging in unethical behavior during online tests.
Time Limits
Students taking online exams can utilise various strategies to cheat in exams, such as locking their browser or disabling new tabs, switching monitors or sharing their screen. Educators can leverage digital tools in order to detect cheating during test taking and guarantee the validity of assessments.
One effective strategy to combat cheating during an online assessment is setting a time limit on tests. Time limits aim to prevent students from copying answers off of other sources or accessing the Internet during exams; however, this alone doesn’t stop cheating entirely as students could still search questions online and answer them quickly without actually reading what’s on paper first.
Time limits don’t take into account that students differ; their recall speed and understanding depend on factors like language experience, personality traits and any accommodations they may receive; therefore imposing one would only hinder honest students and not punish cheaters.
One way to prevent cheating in an online assessment is by delaying scoring. This way, when students submit their score they won’t see it immediately but instead must wait until all students have submitted it before seeing what their score was. This will reduce any impulsive cheating by students wanting to see it immediately and will discourage any immediate score checking by students who may want to do it right away.
Educational institutions can utilize tools like voice detection software that listens for phrases such as “Hey Siri” or “OK Google” to detect suspicious activity and alert a live remote proctor in real-time to pop into an exam session and intervene immediately.
No single method exists to effectively stop cheating in online examinations. But by employing several or all of these measures simultaneously, educators can ensure their assessments remain fair and valid for all test-takers. Furthermore, students may feel less intimidated by an examination when they know their teacher will take necessary precautions to protect the integrity of their assessment, leaving educators to focus on providing quality instruction instead of worrying about cheating issues. To learn more about how Witwiser can help stop cheating in exams contact them today!
Question Pools
Question pools enable instructors to generate a pool of questions that are randomly selected for every student taking an online assessment. By using this feature, the risk of students receiving identical questions in sequence decreases significantly and making sharing answers or swapping questions easier. Moreover, question pools give instructors the flexibility to add questions not covered in lectures/textbooks/assessments or do not fit the difficulty level of other questions is lessened significantly.
Establishing and administering question pools in your course can be an excellent way to reduce cheating. But before using them in assessments, it’s crucial that you understand their workings; once created, once deployed they cannot be changed or moved within an assessment (though you may edit and regrade pools with submissions). Although multiple pools can be added simultaneously to an assessment, only one at a time can be deployed during testing dates; so be sure to create your question pools ahead of the date for testing!
Cheating strategies often involve manipulating the exam process, such as asking for unscheduled toilet breaks or postponing assessments. Some students use devices like earpieces or wireless microphones to help cheat by transmitting answers directly or redirecting them toward specific sections of an exam.
Teachers must consider ways to minimize distractions during an online assessment, with face-tracking software used by some universities as an attempt to detect cheating by tracking facial movement – although this approach requires costly hardware and may not always work effectively.
Other methods for combatting cheating may include increasing the number of questions in an assessment and decreasing its length of time allowed to complete it. Instructors can incorporate problem-solving questions that require examinees to apply their knowledge instead of simply memorizing facts or recalling information; such questions are difficult for examinees to copy, discouraging them from manipulating exam process. Furthermore, these specific types of queries typically cannot be found online and cannot be searched using traditional search tools.
Restricting Access
Online exams provide students with more flexibility, but they also present unique challenges. Cheating is more difficult to detect in online tests due to authentication being harder – unlike with in-person exams where an exam facilitator or proctor could authenticate candidates via webcam authentication, remote authentication is much harder.
As such, some creative students have devised ingenious methods of cheating online exams. They use multiple devices to access questions and answers; sticky notes or other prohibited materials to aid their cheating during an exam; even impersonate another student by showing an altered ID card – sometimes with help from friends who know all the questions and can answer them themselves!
One way to make online exams harder for students who cheat is restricting access to the question bank, but this may not always be viable as many online learners need a variety of resources in order to understand course material and exam formats. Content forensics tools offer another solution by analyzing exam responses and detecting suspicious patterns of behavior such as answering too many questions in too short a period of time.
Altering questions and formats regularly is another effective way to limit students’ ability to cheat in online exams, including switching between multiple choice questions and long-form questions or increasing/decreasing the number of questions in each section of an exam. Another strategy could be asking application-focused questions instead of recall/understanding type inquiries.
Locklizard can also help to protect online test documents by providing document security solutions that enable the prevention of unwarranted sharing and downloading, copy and pasting restrictions and disabling of screen capturing applications during an exam session.