The end of the academic term often brings final examinations and cumulative assessments to test students’ knowledge of course materials. With 30% of college students taking online courses (Allen & Segman, 2017), and that number expeditiously increasing, so will the need for administering exams within the online learning environment.
Many instructors are hesitant to include exams within their online courses because of the potential of compromising academic integrity. Virtual live proctoring technologies but may be too expensive and not part of the instructor’s institution’s distance education infrastructure.
Additionally, having students take exams under the eye of an online proctor may negatively impact student success on the exam (Lieberman, 2018). Even without expensive virtual proctoring tools, there are many ways that instructors can leverage the inherent features within their institution’s Learning Management System (LMS) to decrease cheating during online examinations.
Here are 14 ways to do so:
1. Create questions that require higher order thinking.
2. Use varied question types.
3. Creatively remind students of academic integrity policies.
4. Require students to sign an academic integrity contract.
5. Restrict testing window.
6. Set-up the exam to show one question at a time.
7. Prohibit backtracking.
8. Change test question sequence.
9. Offer different versions of the same test.
10. Allow for only taking the test once.
11. Plan for “technical issues.”
12. Delay score availability.
13. Refrain from using publisher test banks verbatim.
14. Protect test question answers. ♦
