Minimizing Cheating In Online Exams
Cheating in online exams is a serious threat that can result in academic dishonesty, low grades and loss of student trust. There are various strategies teachers can employ in order to minimize cheating during online exams.
Create higher level questions requiring analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Bloom’s Taxonomy). This will make it harder for students to locate answers online or in course materials.
1. Prohibit Backtracking
Backtracking in online exams must be strictly restricted as this could provide students with an opportunity to cheat. When returning to questions they’ve already seen, students could spend too much time looking up answers instead of answering the next one – giving them time to google it or look it up in course materials to find it and avoid detection. By eliminating backtracking completely from online examinations, cheaters could avoid detection while getting to their answers more quickly and get away without penalty.
Additional techniques used by cheaters during an exam include using secondary devices such as Google glasses or smart watches to assist. Unscheduled breaks or postponing the examination could give them more time and prepare for unexpected questions that arise during testing, redirecting webcams or microphones to cover additional hardware, making verification of authenticity more challenging for instructors.
Some test-takers may feel immense pressure to do well because of social or family expectations for them; to do well they feel they need high grades, enter selective colleges, and graduate with honors for job prospects to remain viable. Under such pressure it can lead to cheating as they attempt to make up for any gaps in knowledge or skills by using outside sources or information in order to pass exams successfully.
Few studies have asked students to identify their motivations for cheating during online exams. Unfortunately, most of these studies had limited sample sizes and relied heavily on convenience sampling which reduced validity of results. Future research would benefit from larger, more representative samples as well as clear and unambiguous survey questions.
2. Set-up the Exam to Show One Question at a Time
If you want to minimize cheating during online exams, one way of preventing cheating may be selecting an exam platform which only displays one question at a time. This will limit students from sharing questions and providing answers amongst themselves while making it more challenging for them to use outside resources for cheating purposes.
Design your online exam so that it limits student access to changing their answers – this may involve disallowing them from going back and changing them or locking questions once answered. Furthermore, ensure enough time has been set aside for your students to complete the test without too much extra searching time required online for questions and answers.
Make the exam more effective by including open-ended questions instead of multiple choice or true/false ones that rely on students memorization for answers, rather than multiple choice/true/false exams that depend on students memorizing information. This will force students to analyze, synthesize and evaluate issues instead of just reacting. Consequently, asking a friend or searching the web for answers becomes less appealing when required to explain, deduce and compose their answers instead.
Finally, it is crucial that your students regularly discuss cheating and its repercussions with you and are warned about it. Consider having them watch an academic integrity policy video prior to taking an online examination or signing an electronic contract outlining what constitutes cheating and the corresponding consequences.
3. Prohibit Copying or Pasting
As new devices and gadgets emerge, students have found new methods of cheating online exams. One such strategy involves screen mirroring/sharing in which students steal answers from another student’s device via screen sharing; other options include using tiny undetectable Bluetooth devices to steal answers or memorizing questions and answering them correctly on their own.
These techniques are both common and challenging to catch by proctors. Some online exams prohibit copying or even highlighting, yet many students attempt to circumvent these limitations by typing questions directly into Google Search to locate and copy answers. Others have found ways to steal answers by creating formal braindump sites or “test prep” forums which allow them to sell their content directly to unsuspecting students.
Another challenge with honor codes, in which students pledge not to cheat during an exam, is their ineffectiveness in reducing online cheating (Corrigan-Gibbs et al. 2015a and 2015b). Instead, studies suggest that replacing honor codes with stronger warnings about the consequences of cheating might be more successful at curbing misconduct in online exams.
ExtendedForms now provides educators and administrators with an option to safeguard online assessments by disabling right-click and copy-paste (keyboard shortcuts) functionality across all forms. This can be enabled either through individual form settings, or from within Admin > Form Settings menu.
4. Set a Time Limit
Unveiling online students without cheating during testing and homework assignments is no simple task, which requires test organizers to use creative approaches such as asking higher-order thinking questions such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation (Bloom 1956).
One way to deter students from cheating during exams is requiring multiple forms of authentication – including ID verification via photo, scan or video, face recognition and/or voice recognition – such as ID verification through photo, scan or video, face recognition or voice recognition. This ensures only those authorized to take the test are taking it, as well as helping prevent impersonation which is an increasingly prevalent form of cheating during online tests and exams.
Setting a time limit in an online exam can also help minimize cheating. However, this approach has its own set of issues: the rate at which examinees answer questions varies depending on factors like language experience, personality or accessibility requirements – limiting available exam time can restrict honest students as well.
Instead of restricting how often an online exam is available, a better strategy might be using a timer that stops an examination once its allotted period (e.g. 90 minutes) has passed. This allows those students who qualify for accommodation overrides to continue working on assessments as scheduled and also ensures that computer or browser crashes won’t disrupt score calculation processes during an assessment session.
5. Limit Access to Social Media
Some students use technology to cheat during online exams. Students who possess knowledge in programming or coding may use hacking skills to access multiple-choice questions directly; other may use devices allowing them to mirror their screen onto a projector while using software like ManyCam for hiding their actions from proctor webcams; this makes it harder for proctors to detect cheating examinees online.
Cheating during an online exam may include using hidden cameras, two-way radios or microphones to obtain answers from someone else. Students could also employ false identities during tests by providing fake driver’s licenses or school identification cards as authentication mechanisms remotely.
Studies on academic integrity report high rates of cheating in online exams; however, their results can be hard to interpret due to limited sample sizes and various methods used to measure it. Future research on academic integrity would benefit from larger and more representative samples with clear survey questions that provide accurate and meaningful data without being biased by convenience samples; this will give more accurate and meaningful insights into the nature of the problem as a whole. Likewise, more research must also be conducted into how best to prevent and reduce cheating online exams; one potential solution would be creating cheat-resistant exam designs designed with various security features in place that prevent cheaters from abusing any weak spots that exist within online exams – this might help significantly.
6. Use ProctorExam’s Mobile Phone Monitoring Option
Mobile device use during online exams presents exam administrators with a significant challenge. Students may use phones to search the Internet for answers, chat with helpers through instant messengers or texting apps, store notes in preparation for tests, record cheating behavior or transmit audio during tests – these devices may even contain microphones and cameras capable of recording this activity or transmitting audio directly.
Educational institutions have implemented proctoring software designed to detect suspicious behavior to combat this form of cheating, such as browser locks that restrict only exam websites from remaining open, disable shortcuts and keyboard functions and shut off shortcuts during exams, as well as AI-based solutions which detect suspicious noises, device usage and unusual body language more efficiently than their counterparts.
Unother way of combatting cheating during online exams is requiring candidates to verify their identities. While this might seem unnecessary, verifying identities ensures that only eligible people take an exam – this can be done by matching their photo ID against their face during registration process or by using some remote proctoring services’ mobile apps which offer 360-degree room scans and diagonal desktop views to detect whether candidates are looking at their phones during an exam; some even feature privacy protection features to protect candidates’ private data while they take exams online.