Tips To Reduce Cheating In Online Examinations
By Abdul Aziz Mondal
15 December, 2022
Education
Last Updated on: October 24th, 2024
Online exams are helpful in many ways. Therefore, they are increasing in popularity. However, the one challenge that remains is cheating. There’s nothing worse than a student indulging in cheating and consequent inaccurate test assessment.
No matter how hard you try, cheating during exams will always remain a problem. However, as an instructor, you can take some steps to decrease the incidents of cheating during online assessments.
Here are some tips to help you.
Turn On Your Web Camera
One of the best ways to reduce online cheating is using a web camera. A web camera helps identify students and determine whether or not they are cheating.
When writing an exam, they will often take pictures of the test and share them with other students who copy those pictures. Using a web camera will help detect cheating, ghosting, and plagiarism.
You have two options for turning on your webcam for every student who takes online examinations. First, use software that allows you to disable or enable your webcam anytime during an exam. Secondly, use it only during specific sections where you suspect potential cheating may occur, e.g., writing prompts.
Create Multiple Versions Of Your Exam
You can implement this strategy by creating several versions of your exam paper, assigning each to a different group of students, and using a random number generator to decide which version is given to each student.
This way, the student will not know what version they are taking and, therefore, cannot predict the questions appearing on their exam.
When creating these different versions of your exams, ensure that they cover the same content so that there are no differences in difficulty between them.
It’s also vital that they all have the same number of questions, so you miss none due to an error caused by omitting some questions or changing the order in which they appear.
Deploy A Proctoring Service
You can also use technology to proctor exam remotely. A proctoring service automatically identifies unique violations and upholds academic standards through AI monitoring, webcam, and automated proctoring.
These services allow you to select customized exam conditions, including keystroke analysis and time spent looking away from the screen. A webcam records the entire exam online, allowing for a post-exam analysis.
Students can be briefed beforehand on the proctoring process to ensure that academic integrity is maintained.
Design Questions That Require Analysis And Critical Thinking
The first step in reducing student cheating would be to design difficult questions. You may think that if you make them complex and more challenging, students will have to work harder to answer them.
Wrong. That’s because it’s all about balance in online examinations and other types of test-taking.
Ensure that the questions aren’t too easy, difficult, short or long. The point is there must be a balance between variables for an exam to be considered fair and reliable by the students and invigilators.
Avoid Common Answers Whenever Possible
Provide a combination of text, numbers and images for each question. It will prevent students from copying each other’s answers by mistake and ensure that all solutions are unique.
For example, you could have a picture of the Earth with a red line drawn around it, with the words “I’m feeling like a planet today” written below it; or this could be as simple as a single number within parentheses.
These are some tips to reduce cheating in online examinations. From avoiding common answers to using remote proctoring solutions, you will find every one of these suggestions helpful.
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