To prevent this, never leave your keys hanging in the door and don’t give them to a trusted student for any reason. Also, do not assume that tests and answer guides left at school will be safe. If you are going to leave such test materials at school, be sure to lock them in a file cabinet and keep the key with you at all times. Be sure to change your test content from year to year. This will stop siblings and friends in different grades from passing on last year’s answers.
Be sure that you keep track of what test version each student has. This can be done by numbering the version and having the students write the number they have on their tests. Do not distinguish different versions in a way that can be seen from a distance, for example, by color. Otherwise, students can look around for other students with the same version.
Eventually your students will learn that having the material at their fingertips is of no use unless they actually comprehended the material. For remote exams, webcam and screen proctoring can be used to ensure students are not collaborating or copying test contents that are not intended to be released.
That way, they will be forced to review more information than you are actually going to test them on but they will be prepared for the test. You can give students the questions but not the answers.
This can be done either when entering the exam room or when collecting the exam. Tell students ahead of time that you will not permit entry into the exam room or not grade an exam if the student does not appear on your roster, the student does not have an ID with them, or the student has a false ID.
If leaning over to copy is a problem in your class, you may consider investing in dividers that you pass out at test time to keep students from looking over at one another’s papers. Letting students know you will be doing this beforehand will prevent some students from trying to cheat in the first place. However, it may drive some students towards other more elaborate ways of cheating. For remote exams, if scratch paper will be allowed, require that students show the front and back of all scratch paper before beginning their exam to ensure it is blank. This can also be required prior to logging off at the end to ensure they are not copying exam contents that are not intended to be released.
If you are especially worried about cheating, do not even allow students to have labeled water bottles on their desk. It is a common trick to write answers on the inside of the label and re-glue it to the bottle. You may also require that backpacks be placed in the front of the room (or some other open space) rather than underneath desks for the duration of the exam. For remote exams, require that students do a 360 degree webcam scan of their testing environment prior to starting the exam.
If you are teaching a large class, you might have teaching assistants that are helping with your class. Have them watch the students during testing, so that more of the room can be observed at one time. [5] X Research source For remote exams, watch all (or at least a subset) of the recordings at faster playback speed prior to releasing results.
Allow only one student to leave the room at a time. This will allow you to keep track of who leaves and how long they are gone. If someone is taking frequent bathroom breaks, there is a chance that they have stashed answers in the bathroom. You may tell a student that they must show you where their phone is, and require that it stay in the room. For a remote exam, you may warn students ahead of time that unless such testing accommodations were required to accommodate a disability, bathroom breaks are not allowed.
This would be especially useful in very large university courses, where students may not know the names of those sitting next to them during the exam. You can also create a seating chart documenting who sat where, if you have a small class. This way you can create a chart that keeps friends from sitting right next to one another. If you have a large class, number the seats and have students write their seat number on their test. [6] X Research source
If you need to reseat a student, try to put them somewhere where they are away from other students. Being a seat away from other students may make it easier for that student to focus on their own test.
There are some websites that allow you to return exams electronically. After all exams have been collected, you can scan them, match the submissions to students, grade the exams, and then release the grades online. Students will login to see their scores and a scan of their exam.
Make it clear what the consequences of cheating are when they sign the honor code. You should also have these consequences posted on the syllabus for the class, so that students can refer to it whenever needed.
Part of building trust with your students is showing your students that you care about them. They are less likely to break your rules if they know that you are looking after their best interests and are invested in their success.
This will be especially helpful for students who have very involved parents.
Most cheating on homework is in the form of excessive collaboration or searching for answers on the internet. If you use this type of weighting and thoughtfully construct your exams, the exams will enforce the no cheating policy for homework better than you can. The students who choose to cheat will likely have their grades lowered as a result of poor performance on exams. Those who are too used to being able to freely collaborate or use the internet may have a hard time with individual assessments. This makes it so there is very little incentive for copying solutions and not very much energy needs to be put into dealing with cheating on homework.
If you suspect a student copied off of another student for an exam question or changed their answer after the fact, ask them to reproduce or interpret their solution individually in your presence a few days later. If there is a large difference in their ability to produce that solution during the exam and reproduce the solution individually in your presence, cheating may have occurred. If the work appears illogical, the student probably made a rash attempt to copy from a neighbor.
In a group, each student will have specific responsibilities and they will be accountable to each other for the final product. When students are working together, individual students will find it harder to cheat, since that cheating will be exposed to their classmates. While group projects and presentations will not eliminate cheating altogether, they do make cheating less likely.
Should you catch a student modifying and submitting their work for a regrade, the photocopy or scan becomes hard evidence when you report the case for academic action. This can often happen with students who are very close to the next grade up, who hope to potentially raise a B- grade to a B, for example. So, when photocopying or scanning a sample of exams before returning them, focus especially on those with scores near the grade boundaries.
If a student has a good reason for not turning in an assignment on time, they should be given a slightly different assignment from the rest of the class, so that no cheating can occur. In cases where assignments are reused from year to year, you may not be able to prevent somebody who gained access to the solutions from copying them. Therefore design your exam such that somebody who did not learn the material well cannot perform well.
These essay prompts should be changed when teaching new classes. Students may be tempted to plagiarize if students they know have written on the prompts you are giving.
You can always state that you are OK with students working together, but what they turn in must be their own work. This allows them to work together but it also requires them to do some independent work as well.
Most universities have this type of program built into the websites that they use for students. If your school doesn’t have this type of program available, discuss getting access to one with your supervisor. There tend to be more cases of cheating in the computer science department than other departments at many universities, simply because they have great resources for automated cheat checking.
This way, once the class ends, you are not pressured to review a ton of assignments that were returned months ago. Students, especially those near the course grade boundaries, may want to make attempts to seek extra points to raise their course grades at the end of the term.
