Hi
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic and a switch to remote university courses,
how will remote-learning examinations be invigilated? How do remote-learning apps prevent cheating on examinations?
I look forward to your feedback
I have a friend who is a Math prof. His classes are going online starting next week (this week is spring break). I asked him this question and he said it’s basically the honor system. He knows his students well enough to know who’s cheating but he has no way to prove it. He’ll know for sure next quarter when those students can’t make it through the first week of Calculus 2.
Other people who actually teach remote courses can probably give better answers. All I’ve done is read the advice given by my university to professors who teach regular classes, but have had to move to remote teaching over last weekend. I’ve also read some of the general advice they’ve linked to, so unfortunately I can’t give solid attributions for any of this.
Plan exams to be open book, open internet, and even open neighbor (if that even makes sense). This eliminates cheating by just searching for the answer.
Use the question bank feature of the testing software. This way a whole bunch of questions are prepared, but each student only sees a few of them. This can close down the open neighbor avenue of cheating.
If using questions provided by a prepared curriculum, restate and reword the questions so they don’t appear in a web search.
As above. Open book.
It depends upon the subject, but a time limited open book exam is IMHO the best exam anyway. I caused a bit of a ripple when I created an open book exam for software engineering. More than that, I gave the students a example exam that matched the format and nature of the exam ahead of time.
Why? Be use it removes the rote learnt answers from the exam.
I would hope exactly the same thing could be done for remote exams. What it does do is make the examiner think harder and not be lazy, just setting old exam questions or stuff from the questions section of the textbooks.
I’ve used webcams provided by the school in the past. You connect to a service which provides people watching you take the test. I doubt they would be able to scale that up.
Yes, open book tests.
Just as is done now for online courses. And according to a professor friend, most tests, even in classroom courses, are sort-of open book – the presence of smartphones & online access to nearly every student makes that necessary.
Personally, I’m fine with that. It matches real life, where memorizing facts is less important than knowing how to look them up. Everybody from the mechanic who works on my car to the nurse practitioner who works on me are using computerized equipment to look up manuals & records to do their work.
Yes, open book tests.
Just as is done now for online courses. And according to a professor friend, most tests, even in classroom courses, are sort-of open book – the presence of smartphones & online access to nearly every student makes that necessary.
Personally, I’m fine with that. It matches real life, where memorizing facts is less important than knowing how to look them up. Everybody from the mechanic who works on my car to the nurse practitioner who works on me are using computerized equipment to look up manuals & records to do their work.
Open book, random questions from pools, alternative assignment, requirement to incorporate person-specific information (e.g., go back to an earlier assignment and expands on some aspect of it). I’ve taught online or hybrid courses since 2003.
While we’ve asked our instructors not to give tests during our online-only period, some will “need” to do so, so we’ve been evaluating several remote proctoring services this past week.
In general, they all use a browser add-on that prevents opening other windows, detects google searches, or uses the camera and microphone to determine if something fishy is going on.
The one we saw a demo of today would stop the test immediately if there was anything other than exactly one face in the camera, any unusual noises over the microphone, any detection of copy/paste, any attempt to use other browser windows, and even will seed fake websites with the test question and use IP address monitoring and other tricks (like having the fake website make a loud noise when you try to view the answers) to determine if the student is using another device to look up questions. Of course, the last item requires filing the test far enough in advance that the service can set up the fake websites and promote them to the top of a google search, so it probably is not relevant for a class that’s only being taught online for the first time over the next month.
Some of the services have a live proctor who will oversee the exam, and others use AI to detect “unusual activity”.
Reports and papers have been handed in digitally for a while now (with a check through plagiarism software). Oral exams can be done through skype or teams. For old school written exams…we don’t have solution yet, but for now I guess we will postpone them.
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You can of course give all your instruction online but require students to come in for a one-time exam situation. Exams are pretty good as far as social distancing is concerned - you already want them pretty far apart so they don’t cheat!
I recognise this probably works better in Oz where we’re at the start of the year, as opposed to those countries that are looking down the barrel of finals right now. But an exam isn’t really a “large gathering” in the normal meaning of the word
The better question is how do you prevent cheating on non-electronic tests. It’s a lot easier to cheat when it’s not computerized.
In math and most sciences, there are systems that will generate different problems for every student. The basics of the problem will be the same, but the numbers will be different, so you can’t just share answers. The only way to cheat on those is to have someone do the entire test for you, which is something that happens in lecture halls, too (do you really think that the professor recognizes everyone in a class of 200?). In liberal arts courses like English and history, where the tests are more likely to be essays, you can compare all of the essays to each other, and to vast databases of essays by other students, with the touch of a button.
There’s software for it. Respondus locks down the computer so you can’t get onto the Internet to look up anything. The deluxe version also activates the camera so the instructor can keep an eye on the students. Students are also asked to show the instructor the room with their camera before they start.
Not foolproof – nothing is – but if someone is smart enough to figure out how to bypass it, they are smart enough to pass the test.
Only a handful of faculty will bother, though.
Today I learned a new word. Was everyone else familiar with invigilated? It sounds…biological.
Under the circumstances, a lot of people who lack the necessary hardware or software are being thrust into online education involuntarily and unprepared.
The first I remember encountering it was a few days ago in this “Math with Bad Drawings” post about US vs UK Mathematical Terminology. (UK invigilators = US proctors.)
Never seen it before. I guess it’s more common in the UK. I’m more familiar with proctored.
I had never heard it till I moved to Canada where “proctor” is unknown. I am retired but I would use something like slightly different answers for everybody. You can lock down the student’s computer but can you also lock down their phone? At McGill they have traditionally used paid invigilators who, among other things, go through the room (a large gym) comparing each student’s name with his photo id. And check constantly for cell phone usage and, unless it is explicitly permitted, calculators. Students who use the john are accompanied (so some of the invigilators are women). Clearly, this degree of surveillance cannot possibly be duplicated online.
I once asked a friend of mine at Penn how did Trump get through Wharton? His answer was, “Who knows who took his exams?”
They might be able to. Especially if you don’t have to watch every student, but just record the video for later.
A friend of mine did some remote learning for (I believe) nursing school a few years ago, and she took her tests with a 360 degree camera in the room. Not just watching you, but making sure no one was out of frame feeding you answers.
As someone who teaches both online and in-class in Canada right now at two different schools - the answer is going to be different for every school. It depends on what contingencies, if any, they’ve had in place prior to this and what resources they have available.
As others have correctly noted, there is lots of software that will generate a different exam for every student randomly from a preset database of hundreds of questions. This can be multiple choice, short answer, long answer etc.You can limit how long they have to answer, prevent backtracking, reveal only one question at a time, etc .
However the problem is that to set these up online is pretty much impossible for a professor to do by themselves, you need IT support to program and test the set-up. ) That will be the big issue given the short timelines and limited resources.
Each of the schools I’m at are giving professors direction for finals before the end of the week. I suspect that it will be a final assignment or an open book exam done at home to replace the invigilated final.
Either of those are very doable by myself within our “Blackboard” student software [Blackboard Learn - Wikipedia] and very easy to set-up. I can determine when the final exam info will be posted (date and time), and when I will accept paper electronically, e.g.: "Your final exam paper will be posted on April 13 at 14:00 hours and must be submitted electronically by April 13 at 16:00 hours.
Anything beyond that, for most schools with these tight timelines, will be very unlikely.
Even that will be challenge: At one school I teach at, using BB to communicate and post grades etc has been mandatory for about 7 years. At the other school it’s optional, so about 75% of the professors have never used it, ever. That school is really scrambling and I’m getting lots of calls from colleagues to help them.