How To Stop Students From Cheating On Online Exams
Cheating on online exams is a serious threat that threatens student learning and professional integrity. Learn how to prevent students from cheating and mitigate security concerns when taking online tests.
By asking students more complex, higher-level questions that require application of knowledge rather than recall of facts, higher-level questions prevent cheating by searching the web for answers.
1. Set Up Your Test
Students often cheat on online exams by exploiting technical issues during an exam, such as using website blocking tools, unprotected Wi-Fi connections or sudden computer shutdown. Students could even use their phones to take screenshots and share answers with classmates during an online examination. By planning for such issues in advance, instructors can help their students avoid cheating by planning for possible scenarios that arise and avoiding potential technical glitches that arise during tests.
Teachers can adjust exam settings for online tests in ways to make cheating more difficult for students. Limiting the number of simultaneous questions displayed simultaneously to one makes it harder for students to take screen captures or copy exam content, while application questions (higher-level ones that require applying knowledge rather than remembering and understanding) reduce cheating because students must use their own answers rather than rely on outside materials for answers.
Another way to prevent cheating on online tests is to randomize questions and responses for each student, though this won’t guarantee they won’t cheat, it should significantly lessen collaboration among classmates and the possibility of finding answers to shared questions that were already shared among them.
Before beginning an online exam, it is also crucial that students sign an academic integrity contract to prevent academic dishonesty by reminding them of the consequences and obligations associated with cheating as educational participants. This can be accomplished either through reviewing an academic integrity reminder video prior to their test date or via signing an electronic contract using LMS.
2. Prohibit Backtracking
Students cheat on online exams for various reasons. Some may feel pressured to achieve high GPAs in order to earn college scholarships or graduate with honors in order to find employment after graduation, while others feel social obligations to help a fraternity brother, sorority sister, teammate or senior student pass an exam. Furthermore, there may be instances of students misunderstanding what constitutes plagiarism or having poor study skills that prevent them from keeping up with material presented during an exam.
Students often cheat on online exams by sharing their answers with another student via screen capture, Google Docs or text messaging. Other forms of cheating may involve passing notes back and forth between multiple classmates during an exam; using a proxy server to take tests for them; editing websites so as to alter submitted work (Moten et al. 2013).
Some teachers limit the time students have to take an exam in order to stop cheating, yet this method cannot address all the different rates at which students answer questions, which vary based on language experience, personality traits and accommodations. A better solution would be data forensics software which tracks response times during an exam and flags unusual patterns which indicate cheating.
Limit the number of questions submitted by students, requiring they use only a set amount of time per question, to prevent them from finishing early and returning later to do web searches and cheating activities. Furthermore, teachers should randomly switch up question and answer choices on exams to make it harder for students to quickly locate correct responses.
3. Require Students to Sign an Academic Integrity Contract
Teaching online classes presents unique challenges when it comes to cheating; students can easily access assignments and exams from any location. That can create serious challenges if cheating occurs within your class.
Cheating can have a devastating impact on student grades. Students could lose a whole unit or even be expelled. Cheating can even harm people – for instance architects building buildings without proper foundations, and surgeons performing wrong procedures are both examples of cheating that have the potential to cause injury or harm. As an instructor, it is imperative that assessments remain secure in order to maintain academic integrity and protect academic integrity.
To achieve this, require students to sign an academic integrity contract before taking an exam. This helps students understand the repercussions of cheating and makes it harder for it to happen unknowingly. You could also require they place their phones face down on the desks so it becomes more obvious when someone picks it up to look at during an assessment.
An additional way to prevent cheating is requiring them to have a live remote proctor watching their exam in real-time, listening for specific words or phrases that indicate cheating, and alerting the instructor immediately of any instances of it. Sometimes this solution can even be as simple as installing a browser lock that restricts access to other sites while disabling keyboard shortcuts!
One way to prevent cheating is to implement unique assignment elements into assessments that require students to incorporate course readings, unpublished material into an essay, or explore subjects outside the curriculum. This allows you to easily spot students who attempt to cheat by giving them failing grades as soon as they attempt it.
4. Require Students to Encrypt Their Devices
Digital cheating is a serious threat to online exam security, with students easily using cell phones during exams that are not proctored, searching the web, taking screenshots, or sharing their screen with others. Witwiser offers features designed to prevent students from engaging in such behavior – for instance resizing browser windows during assessments, creating new tabs in Firefox browser, using multiple monitors/computers at the same time, screen sharing etc.
Introduce visual elements into test questions as another method to prevent cheating on online exams and defeat ChatGPT-4’s artificial intelligence proctoring technology, since images or diagrams will likely escape its understanding.
Implementing a proctoring solution that encrypts their devices is another great way to keep students from accessing information not meant for them and ensure they do not share answers with friends and peers, an increasingly common form of cheating on online exams.
Colleges and universities are failing to take necessary measures to prevent students from cheating on online tests, with higher education increasingly moving towards digital forms of instruction. Therefore, schools should implement methods to protect the validity of their exams.
Educators should read this blog post for some key strategies that they can employ to stop students from cheating on online tests. By adopting these best practices, educators will hopefully be better informed and equipped to effectively curb cheating and increase integrity within assessments and grade reports.
5. Require Students to Sign a Code of Conduct
Online testing provides many advantages to both learners and educators alike, including being able to administer exams from anywhere around the globe. Unfortunately, however, its flexibility also enables students to cheat, making it important to learn how to prevent student dishonesty on online exams. Here are five methods of cheating online tests:
While traditional forms of cheating (passing notes and writing answers on palm) have become less frequent in this modern era of technology, other forms of cheating have grown increasingly prevalent. Students may use screen sharing software to show test screens to helpers or share answers with friends; search the web for questions with coded text that contains clues to correct answers; hack into multi-choice exams using their coding abilities in order to alter answer choices for desired results;
To counter these new forms of cheating, instructors should design their exams to be more difficult, asking higher-level questions that demand application rather than recall or understanding. Educators should remind students about academic integrity policies prior to exams and require them to sign an academic integrity contract as this can serve as a powerful deterrent against cheating by outlining what the institution considers violations of academic integrity. Requiring students to install a proctoring app on their devices can also help deter cheating by providing a clear visual indicator if their device is being used for cheating purposes, which can be especially helpful when taking offline exams or lacking reliable internet connectivity. Furthermore, this app can also be programmed to send an one-time password automatically whenever an exam begins.