New Quizzes: Convert Question Text to an Image to Prevent Easy Web Searches
One constant irritation all instructors face is constantly worrying that students are using their computer to look up answers. Instructors of courses where the questions very often have a very specific fact that can be easily looked up are constantly battling students testing the boundaries. Obviously, the Activity Log has been a huge help in helping to detect this type of cheating. However, students still use their computer or mobile device to look things up.
As a way to slowing down and discouraging would be cheaters facing a timed assessment, I wonder whether it would be possible to have questions be converted to an image and presented that way as opposed to just text. Having the question be presented as an image would prevent a student from copying the question text and performing a quick web search for the answer. Even though forcing the student to type out the question might not seem like a big deal, the extra time needed to type out the question forces the student into a difficult position of deciding whether to speed through the exam and actually finish the exam or slow down to look up answers
I had toyed with converting all my questions into images instead of text, but with question banks in the hundreds of questions, the feasibility went out the window real quick. I figured it might be easier at the server level to incorporate such a feature which would also allow for auto-scaling of the image to the resolution of the monitor being used by the student. You could easily adapt it to visually impaired students by changing the size of the text or having the text be read as audio
Thoughts on the feasibility and likely adoption of such a feature by other instructors?
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