Academic Integrity

[jbelliotti]

Why is it suggested not to use logs as confirmation of cheating?

[Stef_retired · Accepted solution]

@jbelliotti Canvas Quiz logs are not designed or intended for that purpose. Please review the information in the blue box of  How do I view a quiz log for a student?

[Stef_retired · Accepted solution]

@jbelliotti Canvas Quiz logs are not designed or intended for that purpose. Please review the information in the blue box of  How do I view a quiz log for a student?

[hesspe]

Hi,

Canvas Quiz logs are not designed or intended for that purpose. Please review the information in the blue box of How do I view a quiz log for a student?

Sorry but this is not an answer to what I think is a legit question.  It only refers back to the document that contains the warning that is being questioned in the first place:

"Quiz logs should not be used to validate academic integrity or identify occurrences of cheating."

But there no reason for that assertion offered in the document.  It agrees with my intuition about the logs, but it doesn't even an effort to explain why Quiz log data might be unreliable or misleading.  To "Canvas Quiz logs are not designed or intended for that purpose" one might reasonably respond, "What then are the logs designed or intended for?"

[Stef_retired]

@hesspe  Here's additional detail from the blue information box that explains the intended purpose of the quiz logs: 

You can view quiz logs to view the status of your student quizzes. This feature is designed to help you investigate problems that a student may have in the quiz and gain insight into your quiz questions [emphasis added]. Quiz logs are not intended to validate academic integrity or identify cheating for a quiz.

You can discuss this more fully with your school's Customer Success Manager (CSM), or if you're not the Canvas admin for your school, ask your admin to bring it up at their next meeting on your behalf.

[gnoack · Accepted solution]

HI @hesspe and @jbelliotti 

In my practical experience, the only important thing the log can tell you related to academic honesty is when a student clicked away from the web browser.  There could be many reasons for this, such as clicking the taskbar by accident, clicking another tab (again, maybe by accident), or perhaps a notification appeared on their device and they clicked to close it.  There are so many reasons that log notice could be triggered I don't think it would be fair to judge a student's performance by it.  So, the log is more useful for understanding how a student progressed through the quiz, or to verify other activities that might have happened. 

If you want a true understanding of what students are viewing you'd need software designed to do this, these are called online test proctoring and some examples include HonorLock, Lockdown Browser, or ProctorU. 

I hope that helps. 

[jbelliotti]

@gnoack - thanks for the great response. This makes complete sense to me. I'm surprised the Instructure team couldn't explain it this well.

THANKS AGAIN!