Keep the Cheating Tide at Bay
Posted on May 8, 2009 in Instructor Education, Newsletter, Teaching
How to Reduce or Prevent Cheating Online
As the advantage of online learning breaks location and time barriers, educational institutions still face the challenge of student authentication. It is considered highly unethical for someone else besides the enrolled online student to answer exam questions or write a final paper, especially since it hinders the student from attaining a quality education.
It has been a perennial challenge to prevent students from using the textbook, consulting with friends, or otherwise cheating on a quiz or exam, so professors, administrators and accreditors alike are always trying to find new and better solutions to tackle this problem. According to the American Council on Education of Higher Education Act Reauthorization, under the Higher Education Act of 2008, “Accreditors must require institutions that offer distance education to establish that a student registered for a distance education course is the same student who completes and receives credit for it.”
Close collaboration with partner schools and implementation of industry standards and online teaching best practices enables the Learning House training department to suggest several techniques that schools can use to reduce cheating and create more secure exams. Some of these techniques are outlined below.
1. The easiest method to reduce cheating simply involves setting exam attributes properly. Allowing only one attempt for an exam and enforcing a time limit are effective ways to reduce cheating. If students can access the exam more than once, they may print out the exam and look up the answers.
Some students will take an exam to determine the correct answers through trial and error. By only allowing one attempt, an instructor can prevent students from this kind of guesswork. Also, by timing an exam, an instructor can prevent students from looking up all of the answers, simply because it is impractical to look up everything in a textbook without some idea of the correct answer.
2. It is also important to consider the types of questions being asked. Questions that require critical thinking and the careful application of information learned through the course are preferable to questions that simply require the recitation of facts. Not only is it more difficult to cheat when applied knowledge is required, but such questions also allow instructors to test students at a higher level of thinking.
3. Honesty statements are a low tech, but surprisingly effective, method of preventing cheating. Ask students to fill out and sign a form affirming that they took the exam honestly, without referencing textbooks, notes, or seeking outside help. Most people consider themselves honest and honorable. Asking them to place their signature on such a document makes it more difficult to reconcile that self-image with conscious cheating. At the least, this is one more opportunity to clearly express the school’s policy on academic honesty and clearly stipulate the punishment for breaking that policy.
Another suggestion is to include the institutional policy on cheating and plagiarism both in the syllabus and as an early required reading in the course. For one, it is entirely reasonable to inform students of the standards to which they should conform. This technique also provides an opportunity to teach students about plagiarism and why it is unethical. Students from the “download” generation may have little or no notion that copying is not permissible. Requiring students to review the policy disarms the excuse of ignorance, whether it is legitimate or not.
4. Other drastic and more involved measures to correctly identify the actual exam taker include biometric solutions such as fingerprints and IP address verification, which is unique for each location where the examinee takes the test. Multiple exams completed from the same IP address at different, subsequent times clearly indicates that more than one student is present at one location. Students could still circumvent this by working in adjacent areas of a computer lab or dorm room.
5. As a last resort to reduce cheating on a quiz or exam, colleges can also use proctoring services, which requires a third party to administer a test. Each student is required to take the exam in the presence of a proctor. Either the school’s faculty or on-campus staff may proctor a test, or the school may hire qualified proctors from off-campus.
While this option can significantly help decrease a student’s likelihood to cheat, it still does not eliminate the risk of cheating entirely. Furthermore, proctoring can be difficult or expensive to coordinate and may not work for students who are unwilling or unable to travel to a proctoring site.
However, a growing amount of technology is devoted to virtual proctoring, which allows a proctor to observe students remotely through cameras. The Learning House can help locate such technologies, help faculty set up a proctored exam and consult with partner schools to determine whether such options will actually work.
All authentication procedures must be correctly integrated into the learning process – online or face-to-face – so they do not interfere with or diminish privacy, disrupt learning or require a large number of resources to implement and maintain.
None of the solutions mentioned above should be used in isolation. Ideally, it is best to combine as many of these techniques as possible. Timing an exam, requiring an honor statement and asking questions that require critical thinking will yield a robust exam that is resistant to cheating. While these measures do not entirely eliminate cheating, they make it much more difficult. At some point, it becomes more worthwhile for students to study rather than cheat. By adding the technology aspect of IP address verification, colleges and universities will quickly see positive results when properly authenticating online students.
