Ask Slashdot: How To Allow Test Takers Internet Access, But Minimize Cheating?

New submitter linjaaho writes "I work as lecturer in a polytechnic. I think traditional exams are not measuring the problem-solving skills of engineering students, because in normal job you can access the internet and literature when solving problems. And it is frustrating to make equation collections and things like that. It would be much easier and more practical to just let the students use the internet to find information for solving problems. The problem: how can I let the students access the internet and at same time make sure that it is hard enough to cheat, e.g. ask for ready solution for a problem from a site like Openstudy, or help via IRC or similar tool from another student taking the exam? Of course, it is impossible to make it impossible to cheat, but how to make cheating as hard as in traditional exams?"

Comments

Sometime the old ways

[h2oliu]

I remember being allowed to bring notes with me to class. Would just making this open book/open notes accomplish the same thing?

Re:Sometime the old ways

[Mashiki]

Some of the toughest exams I've ever taken have been open book. Mostly because they require you to understand not only the theory, but the application of the theory and law to the problem. This usually shows that both the instructor, and the student understands the course material. And that it was being taught, and understood correctly.

Re:Sometime the old ways

[AliasMarlowe]

Some of the toughest exams I've ever taken have been open book.

Same here. My observation was that if the test was "open-book", the books would not be much help.

Re:Sometime the old ways

[cptdondo]

I went to school when calculators were first starting to be available. That meant the rich kids could drop $400 for the Bowmar Brain with all the scientific functions and the rest of us had to made do with the TI-11 (or whatever it was...)

So the engineering school designed all the tests without numerical answers. You had to set up the problem and explain the solution, and devise a test to see if your solution was correct. All without using numbers....

Those were some of the hardest tests I ever took. 3 hours, 3 problems, and you sweated blood. I remember one of the problems:

"Calculate the heating of the skin of a rocket as it lifts off through the atmosphere. Assume the engines put out constant thrust. Account for fuel consumption and thinning of the earth's atmosphere."

I would bet that even today Google would be at a loss to provide an answer.

That's what I'd do.... Devise a test that required you to think through the answer.

Use Random Variables and have a time limit.

[roeguard]

When I was in grad school, in many classes we were allowed to use the internet on tests, as well as our notes, any spreadsheets/programs/scripts we had pre-made, etc. The caveat was that the tests were structured in a way that if you didn't already know what to do, you wouldn't have enough time to look it up and still finish the test. Googling things takes time. And the test really only provided enough time to actually do what you already knew.

You can also use random variables for each test, or groupings of tests, to prevent direct copying of answers. With a time limit, cheaters would have to wait for someone else taking the test to find the correct answer, send it out, and then modify it to match their own variables. If they can do all of that in a crunch, chances are they understand it pretty well on their own, even if they are lazy.

Re:Use Random Variables and have a time limit.

[Anonymous Coward]

What has also seemed to work decently is oversight. The one class I've taken where we were allowed to use the computers on our exams, the teacher made a point of showing us her setup: she was simultaneously viewing approximately a quarter of the class's screens at any one time, could throw it up on the overhead, or even lock them out, record it, etc (and of course the screens would randomly switch to a different set every so often).

And she showed us. It was funny when she pointed out by name a couple people logged into facebook.

Most people aren't going to risk anything when they know they're being watched.

Wikipedia on Disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Give them access to a copy of wikipedia on disk. If they can't find the information there, they will be unlikely to find it elsewhere on the internet, but there should not be explicit answers to test questions.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_on_CD/DVD

Collaboration is a skill too

[robot256]

If you're going to allow them unlimited research, then why not let them collaborate too? Give the whole class a set of problems big enough that they need to organize and split them up to get them all done in time. And if they can find the solution already completed elsewhere, so be it, that's what a good engineer is supposed to do. The whole point of working in the real world is that your performance depends on those around you, so the only way to measure the performance of students individually is to put them in an artificial problem solving situation like a traditional exam. That's why we still have paper, closed-book exams in theory classes, and why there are an increasing number of "project classes" where the entire class grade depends on the success of a hands-on group project.

cheating shouldn't be your problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Ultimately, the cheater only hurts themselves. It shouldn't be your concern as to whether they are cheating. The only thing a lock does is keep an honest person honest. The cheaters will find a way, no matter what you do to restrict them, so the better solution is to make them take responsibility for their cheating by trusting them not to cheat.

My alma mater has an honor code, that is essentially this, on every assignment for credit, whether paper, exam, etc... you had to write a statement saying you upheld the honor code and sign it. In return, professors were hands off when we took a test, they weren't allowed to be on the same room (they had to be available if we had questions, but they were not allowed to watch us take the test. The school TRUSTED us to do the right thing, and the amazing thing is, most people did. Cheating was certainly not eliminated, but I'm willing to bet that there was far less cheating than the typical college.

Re:Watch them closely

[Anon-Admin]

Or the professor could collect hundreds of questions and let the system randomly select so no two students have the same questions. Questions could be cumulative meaning that next semesters questions could be any of the 300 from last semester or one of the 100 from this one. Eventually there would be thousands of questions. Making it harder to cheat each semester.

Re:Whitelist it.

[Korin43]

I was going to write something about how you'd end up blacklisting sites that have good answers just because they have the ability to post questions (like Stack Overflow). Then I realized that using a site like that would be considered cheating in just about any class I've ever taken, even if they did let you look up reference material.

Apparently, my entire job involves "cheating" non-stop.

Re:Watch them closely

[Lando]

In my tests, I typically draw up questions based on information that we have covered in class using hypothetical situations. For many subjects, such as mathematics this doesn't work too well since they can just look up a formula generator and pull the information from there. Therefore questions basically need to be new for each test and cover application of theory rather than basic formula. Another thing that helps is making sure that there are enough questions that if they have to look up information for each question they will not be able to finish the test before time runs out. Preferable to plain answers of course are essay questions, but those will add to the time that it takes to grade the papers. I generally run my finals as take home tests, but they are considerably harder to answer than the typical tests. Being that the courses I teach are college level I find this works well, but requires one to two hours to grade each test which means that I have an upper limit of around 60 tests I can grade between turn in deadline and when scores have to be entered into the system. Since I make each test up per class every semester I can gauge the complexity of the tests depending on class size and competence of TA's.

If you do limit the test to in class tests remember, unless the classroom supplies computer systems to access the web, the students with laptops have an unfair advantage over those that do not or have slow computers.