WebCT Tip: Reducing Online Cheating

Karla Embleton
College of Family and Consumer Sciences
Iowa State University
November 6, 2002

---

As any instructor will tell you, there is no fool proof way to completely prevent cheating either in a traditional classroom or in an online course. However, there are things an instructor can do to reduce the likelihood of cheating. These things fall into two categories: course management and assessment.

Typically, an instructor who is more involved with his or her students will find that there is less cheating occurring. In an online course this means that the instructor is paying attention to how often students are accessing the online materials, which portions of the course students are or are not visiting, and monitoring student contributions to discussions and chat sessions.

It is also critical to reduce the pressure on the student to cheat. This can be done by forgoing the traditional one chance, time limited quiz and replacing it with an assessment method that encourages mastery learning. Several instructors in Family and Consumer Sciences are finding this latter approach to work well.

For example, in FCEDS160, students are allowed to repeat the weekly quiz up to a maximum of three times. Some, or all, of the questions presented during each attempt are randomly drawn from a question pool so that each attempt is unique. When a student submits a quiz, it is automatically graded and the student is informed of the grade and which questions were answered correctly. The full answer key is not provided since that would discourage students from going back to their notes and finding the correct answers. In addition, students' recorded scores are the average of their attempts. This discourages students from attempting the quiz "cold" the first time just to see what the questions are. It also encourages students to make a second attempt if they are unsatisfied with their initial grade. The use of a question pool reduces the "usefulness" of students "sharing" the quiz with classmates who have not yet attempted it. Since students have more than one chance and the quiz is available for an entire week, there is less  pressure on the student to get it right the first time, and thus resort to some means of cheating.

Other general and specific approaches to minimize cheating include:

• look for alternative ways of assessing student success, such as frequent participation in online discussions, chats and group projects
   
• require drafts and outlines of work to be submitted
   
• require frequent postings and activities so that it would be more difficult for a student to get someone else to do their work
   
• do not rely on unproctored online quizzes for the total grade in a course
   
• require students to post introductions at the start of the course so that you can get a feel for their individual writing styles and command of the language
   
• talk to a student by phone or in person regarding the content of the course or work submitted (it is reasonable to expect that they should be able to explain their own work)
   
• provide many graded and ungraded assessment opportunities for students (consider using the Self Test tool or weekly "practice" quizzes)
   
• include open ended questions that require thoughtful analysis of the subject matter and compare student submissions
   
• set up a private Discussion topic for each student to use as a personal journal during the course (and grade these as such)
   
• have students work in groups to answer specific discussion questions and provide a means whereby students rate their group members contributions
   
• let students know that you can and will monitor group discussions (whether you choose to be an active participant is up to you)
   
• assume that all online quizzes are open book format
   
• add a password to proctored exams, and an IP restriction if feasible
   
• randomize the question order so that even if students all see the same questions, the order will differ
   
• randomize the order of answer choices in questions (where practical) so that students cannot simply tell others "the answer is B." (Warning: if a student opens a quiz that uses randomly ordered questions and answer choices for questions, then backs out without submitting the test, when they reopen the quiz the same questions will show in the same order but the answer choices will be in a new order.) 

(Several of the points listed above were taken from The Ultimate WebCT Handbook, 1^st Edition, Division of Distributed and Distance Learning, Georgia State University, 2001)