A common question in online learning is “How do we keep students from cheating in online exams?” A shift from traditional means of assessment (quizzes, tests, exams) to authentic and alternative assessments is critical in virtual settings.
If faculty try to assess their students the same way they did in a face-to-face setting, they will most likely find themselves frustrated, as well as frustrating their students.
In a Faculty Focus article, Laura McLaughlin, EdD, and Joanne Ricevuto, EdD, provided some recommendations to improve the use of assessments in virtual environments and decrease concerns regarding cheating. Their recommendations are:
- Allow choice in assessments: Let students decide how they will demonstrate their learning.
- Authentic and stackable assessments: Students should be told why they are assigned a particular assessment, and why it is relevant to their learning.
- Trust students: Provide alternative assessments (not quizzes and tests) where the concern of cheating is off the table.
- Frequent feedback and communication: Provide feedback that helps learners improve their learning.
Teaching in a virtual environment creates an opportunity to rethink your practices, try something new, and embrace deeper and more engaging ways of assessing students without using lockdown browsers or worrying about students cheating.
If this has piqued your interest, you can read more in this Assessments in a Virtual Environment: You Won’t need that Lockdown Browser! article.
Did you miss our (Re)Thinking Exams workshop? If you want to learn about ways you can challenge your students to demonstrate what they've learned while teaching in an online environment, watch this (Re)Thinking Exams workshop recording. In this workshop, Dr. Elizabeth Yost Hammer and Dr. Jay Todd discussed and demonstrated ways that focused active learning activities can be used in place of more traditional methods of assessment like quizzes and tests.
The sudden shift to remote learning led to concerns about new opportunities for students to engage in unauthorized shortcuts. During spring 2021, three academic integrity and STEM professionals from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a primarily online institution, shared research on academic integrity in online courses, strategies for promoting integrity in remote learning environments, and examples of how content learning is achieved in any setting designed for online education. ICYMI, here's a link to the Proactive Approaches for Academic Integrity in Remote and Online Learning workshop recording.
Image credit: "online assessment" by jflorent is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 and is a derativie of image by coffeebeanworks and image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
