How do you keep students from cheating?

[Nichole Chartier]

Our school has recently started using Sakai because of the online testing feature. Here is our situation, our students use their own devices and connect to the campus internet to take online tests. What has recently come to our attention is that students are cheating through other applications by screenshotting the questions and using airdrop to send to an outside source and then getting answers that way. My question to the Sakai community is there a way to keep students from cheating during the tests AND still let them use their own devices? We would really like to allow students to use their own devices because we simply do not have the resources to provide them. Thank you so much for any and all suggestions.

Nicole Chartier

Uskudar American Academy

[Marilyn Dispensa]

I’m not sure about Sakai, but there are now students using glasses with built in cameras to take pictures of exams, send them to an outside source and then get answers on their smart watches in code.

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[David Eveland]

Nichole,

 

On one level, and to Marilyn’s point: if students are dead-set on cheating – they’ll find some way to do so, eventually.  I think this may need to be addressed as much as possible from a mitigation standpoint but there may be other options as well.

 

Here are some ways to do so in my way of thinking (some are easily doable* in Sakai, some are not):

 

• Use an honor code – while not full-proof, it does provide a means of dismissing a student for credible evidence of cheating
• Use sets of questions drawn from a pool of questions – the larger the pool*
• Set time limits on assessments, something like 30 seconds a question or less – Sakai only permits a limit on the assessment, not on individual questions, at least in 11.4*
• Set specific times of the day/week when assessments can be done, rather than leaving them open-ended.
• Through the use of Lessons, require students to complete other items prior to being able to access assessments
• Set assessments to display a question per page (this makes the load time longer for the assessment but may also make it more difficult to screenshot content quickly – esp. if paired with a time limit). Assessments can also be presented on one really long page, with use of sections, but this too may be just as easy to screenshot and distribute
• Require students to take the same assessment a minimum of 3 times in order for it to count towards their final grade – and retain only their average score – or their last score. (this would be harder to track at scale) Why not? If mastery of low-level knowledge/recall of material is the goal – repetition can help. I actually have several quizzes from publisher test banks, drawn from a pool, set to a time limit and permit students to take them as many times as they wish until a published deadline, retaining just their average score on each assessment.
• Make low-level assessments worth a small percentage of the overall course grade but make their completion required in order to pass the course. This of course means other assessment functions of the course (often more nuanced) such as papers, discussions, interactions, projects, etc. must make up the rest of the overall course grade.
• Provide multiple opportunities for students to take the assessment with a smaller number of questions, drawn from a pool – always keeping their average score, not the highest or last.
• Include a question from earlier in the course in the question set
• Craft assessments to have a total of 10 points over say 15 questions, with 5 questions being worth 0 points. Do not disclose point values during the assessment. Only those 10 questions with actual point values attached count toward a grade.*
• Acquire and put in place something like Respondus LockDown Browser *
• If sharing the answers is a workflow students are using, leverage it better instead of having quizzes – have sets of questions all students must work through (not unlike a study group might do) – especially if the goal is to have students become familiar with low-level ‘fact’ concepts…. THEN make summative assessments ask the more difficult questions
• Completely remove use of low-level assessments and instead have students narratively write out (via Assignments with use of a plagiarism detection service) their answers to 4 higher level questions out of 10 offered in class, during the class session – each student chooses 4 out of the 10 to answer – and set a time limit. You might also set a word limit (answers must be exactly 152 words; no more, no less)

 

Bottom line: there’s no perfect answer to this – if students want to cheat and have the will and means, they’ll figure out a way to do so. These ideas are not intended to make it harder on students, but to mitigate cheating or even inclination to cheat.  The idea behind mitigation is to persuade students to do the learning they need to in the first place by creating speed bumps, road blocks or by creating “zones” where the workflow of cheating is leveraged (if that makes sense).

 

Best to you!

 

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Dave E.

865-251-2320

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[Nichole Chartier]

Thank you so much David for the suggestions, we are slowly learning how best to use Sakai. Many of your suggestions we already implement except displaying one question per page as that sometimes overloads our server when 200+ students are taking the assessment at one time. It appears our best option is to purchase something like the respondus lockdown broswer. We do have a policy that all phones and smartwatches are collected before the assessment begins but despite constant monitoring and using question pools and time limits students are still cheating by using other applications from their computers. Thank you again to everyone for all the great suggestions. 

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[Daniel Merino]

Hi everybody, I would like to add two points to this interesting topic.

-Here in my university, one trick used in the tests of Sakai is configuring them with a background color. It eases the surveillance work as it is easy to see if anybody has changed to another browser/tab/site (of course, the chosen color must be changed from time to time).

-About Respondus Lockdown Browser, there is another similar open source tool but it has not an integration with Sakai. The linked JIRA is: https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-34647 .

HTH

El 07/05/18 a las 12:17, Nichole Chartier escribió:

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Daniel Merino Echeverría
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Gestor de E-learning - Centro Superior de Innovación Educativa.
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[David Eveland]

Daniel,

 

Great idea about changing the background color! If this is paired with having student’s screens being oriented so the instructor can see them (rather than having the back of the screens face the instructor at the front of a classroom), this can go a long way.

 

As I recall taking automated tests at a local testing center (unaffiliated with Sakai), they had students schedule their tests, and on the day of the test students have to empty all of their pockets, are not permitted to wear or have any electronic devices (unless they’re hearing impaired). The whole process was really intimidating – and failure to abide by the testing requirements in anyway forfeit the test results completely – requiring test takers to wait at least 3 weeks to take the same test again.

 

Another option also might be to pair low-level assessments (such as multiple-choice, true/false, matching, fill in the blank) with an essay submission (that runs through Vericite or similar) to create a composite score. 

 

I’m glad we’re having this discussion, perhaps the T&L folks should take it up as a topic of conversation?

 

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Dave E.

865-251-2320

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[Tiffany Stull]

Hi all,

I'm amazed anyone has found a pedagogical "use" of the background color in quizzes.  I think the background color option should be removed for accessibility reasons.

When using a background color, it is important to make sure it has sufficient contrast with black text (for example, using a color contrast checker like WebAIM's: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ ).  Question text is always black unless otherwise specified, and True False questions always have black answer text (no option to change color).

The most common background color I have seen used in a quiz is bright teal; I would find it annoying if I were a test-taker.  Something like that could be problematic for students with certain cognitive disabilities.

WebAIM has some good examples of user perspectives regarding potential issues with color/distraction:

• https://webaim.org/articles/userperspective/
• https://webaim.org/articles/cognitive/
  

Tiffany Stull