Should You Worry About Cheating on Online Tests During COVID-19?
One of the depressing yet unsurprising outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis has been the increase in concern about online test security. People are worried students will cheat on their tests.
I definitely understand this concern. Like many instructors who have taught online for a while, it is one of many issues I’m hearing about fresh once again, after having worried about and resolved it over a decade ago.
I perhaps naively thought of online testing as one of those things that “more or less resolved” at an institutional level, when clearly in-person instructors have no clue what we’ve been doing online all this time.
I’m also reminded that people really believe the test security measures they use in person are effective. Let me be really clear here: they aren’t. If a student wants to cheat, they’ll find a way, and you probably won’t be able to stop it. Research in this area suggests over 50% of college students cheat on an exam or test at some point, and most cheating occurs in-person because most teaching occurs in-person. Or at least, it did before COVID-19.
When people worry about the shift online increasing cheating, what they are really saying is, “If not for my tight exam security practices in person, cheating would be rampant!” The reality is that your exam security practices already don’t work that well. No one’s do! If someone wants to cheat, they’ll find a way, and it doesn’t particularly matter whether they’re in your classroom or in front of their laptop screen. With more resources, they might be slightly better at cheating, but individual integrity is a far better predictor of whether someone will try to cheat within a given testing context than security behaviors.
Consequences aren’t the sole prevention method for immoral acts. If homicide became legal tomorrow, would most people start murdering everyone around them? A violent minority probably would, but most people wouldn’t, because murder is morally wrong. Society judges you rather harshly for murder!
The same pattern applies here, with the addition of one caveat. Cheating is immoral, and that alone prevents most people from cheating. But when an onslaught of new situational cues overpowers cultural norms, e.g., if you have screaming kids at home under quarantine preventing you from studying as much as you want to, you might be tempted into cheating when you otherwise would not be.
That means your real responsibility as an instructor is not really to implement cheating-prevention techniques but to make cheating unattractive in relation to the morality violation that cheating would create. If you implement generous time limits, reset exams freely when technology problems occur, allow a week span to take the exam, allow open-book exams, and so on, you are actively removing factors that make cheating attractive.
For those worried about grades increasing, let me tell you a story. Like many others, when I moved my in-person class online with an identical test (combo of multiple choice and short answer; same questions), and then later explicitly made that same test open-book, the grade mean and distribution did not change. At all. In fact, the test means were all within 2 points of each other (out of 100) between all three times!
Perhaps the best way to say this: cheaters gonna cheat. You don’t need to worry about them online any more than you worried about them in person.
There are things you can do to decrease the attractiveness of cheating while simultaneously improving your students’ learning. For example, deploy more difficult, highly thoughtful exams that are clearly and unambiguously communicated to students as open-book, open-note. My own favorite approach? Create high-complexity multi-component group projects that require demonstration of capabilities gained during the course. Not only do you get to see your course material come to life through what they produce, but you also have less to grade!
Above all, remember that your overall goal here is to encourage students to take your material seriously and to learn. “Preventing cheating” is a very small part of that charge and not worth nearly as much time as either better pedagogy or helping students manage their stress in this time of crisis.
And one final point: inflicting Respondus on your students halfway through a semester in the middle of a pandemic will help literally no one!!!
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One thing that social psychology has taught us is that situational variables drive behavioral actions much more than personality variables. While that goes against your primary point, I wholeheartedly agree with all of the practical conclusions you make. In our world, students who want to cheat will cheat. However, my experience has been when one makes it harder to cheat, fewer students cheat and those who do will do it less.
I think that actually supports my point – norms surrounding the morality of cheating is culturally-bound, i.e., situational. We can see that clearly in cross-cultural differences in attitudes towards cheating. This is really a matter of which situational influences are stronger than others, with a dash of ethics!
While I agree with some of what you’re saying, I feel a slight condescending attitude in the article. A “ come on in class teachers, we’ve put that concern behind us years ago” is not particularly conducive to a give and take forum. There are valid concerns about cheating on line and they need to be discussed in a manner where both sides benefit.
That was not my experience. Exam averages when up 20% from the norm, student’s previously scoring 30s and 40s on exams jumped to 70-90%. I created a pool for each question and had the LMS select a random question for each student. Each student had a unique exam. I admit the problem is that the question difficulty was the same as the in-person tests but now it is open book/notes/friends/parents/tutor etc. Creating higher level questions and having enough questions so that each student gets a unique exam is very difficult. The test prep was about 15 hours per exam. I can imagine the other way, with unique and high level questions would require 100+ hours per exam and with 5 exams there would no time in the semester to do anything else. Also, I know that at least some student’s would score in the 90s but still have no idea what is going on based upon their lab reports and the questions they would ask me in emails. I teach chemistry.
The Blackboard application, and I would think most other online classroom applications, offer a “time” function. As such, one may impose a time limit on the overall test, and the individual questions (if desired). Having taken quite a few of these tests, I can report this time constraint can be throttled to effectively reduce/eliminate any sort of cheating. Of course, the construction of the test questions can play a role here. For example, my Managerial Accounting class had weekly quizzes limited to a total 20 minute session and comprised of 10 computational questions. In essence, we had 2 minutes to calculate each answer. We either knew how to function or we did not. Similarly, for exams of longer time constraints and more questions, constructing the questions and answer choices carefully eliminated any reward for attempting to find the answer in a text book.